


On a Darkling Plain

by fellowshipper



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Character Death, Eventual Relationships, F/M, Frostiron Adjacent, Gen, Loki & Tony Stark Friendship, Loki (Marvel) Lives, Loki (Marvel) Redemption, Loki is a Terrible Bro (But Also Kind of a Good One?), M/M, Peter Quill found something he can't solve with a dance-off, The power of friendship has nothing to offer Loki, Thor Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Is Done With Space, Visions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2020-03-06 17:31:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 47,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18855733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipper/pseuds/fellowshipper
Summary: Loki's fate has never been straightforward, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Norns playing their best trick yet by setting him upon the path of a would-be hero -- not one who acts from justice, but from vengeance. And if his burning desire to kill Thanos himself is all that's driving him, so be it.He just doesn't expect that desire to destroy what little he still cherishes.(AKA, the Infinity War/Endgame fix-it fic that's eating my brain.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welp. Time for me to throw my hat into the fix-it ring, I suppose. 
> 
> Like a lot of other people, I'm pretty unhappy with how Endgame played out. It didn't capitalize on the promise of Infinity War and the 20+ movies that came before it, and it certainly didn't let Loki's story pay off in any kind of satisfying way. 
> 
> This is my attempt at addressing those grievances. 
> 
> ~~And for the curious, yeah, I'm not sure if this is going to end up being frostiron. I don't _think_ it is, just because I refuse to fridge Pepper and ignore Morgan, but I'm not ruling it out at this point, either. You've been warned.)~~ haha just kidding. God, I'm predictable.

_I only ever wanted to be your equal._  

The words continue to echo in Loki’s mind, taunting, merciless, stripping away every defense he tries to build between what he wants and what he _has_ and what he can _get_ ; all three have always been separated. 

_I never wanted the throne._  

That much, at least, had been a partial truth at best. Loki had never wanted the tedium and politics that came with ruling. He wanted the glory and the unwavering admiration, and in the heat of his desperation, it had made no difference to him if that loyalty was given freely or surrendered out of fear of him. So long as everyone else bent their knees and bowed their heads, he didn’t much care exactly how they came to kneel at his feet. 

But the equality bit—oh, he’d certainly meant that, perhaps the only true thing to have ever crossed his lying lips in all the centuries he had known Thor: the golden child, the favored one, the vaunted warrior. He was Asgard’s champion practically from birth, and he looked the part with his sun-kissed skin and hair the color of a warm autumn sky at sunset. He was loud and boisterous, strong and arrogant to a fault, and Loki was . . . 

“You are his moon,” Frigga had told him once when he’d gone to her with all his childish jealousy and insecurity. She, the only person he could truly confide those feelings to, had stroked his hair and cooed at him like any loving mother would, reassuring him there was nothing _wrong_ with him (and oh, the secrets she had kept then as well), that if Thor was the sun, shining brightly enough to cause Asgard’s golden spires to gleam brighter than they otherwise might, then Loki was the moon providing light in the utter darkness of night, a silver guide through darkened pathways that only he could see unaided. 

The problem with that, of course, was that moons were dead, frozen rocks trapped in unwilling servitude to a larger body holding sway over it. 

And suns burnt out and died. 

_I only ever wanted to be your equal._  

Oh, would that he could change now, that he could deny his very nature. Greed and ambition had only been secondary; it was blinding jealousy and centuries of stifled resentment that finally erupted into violence. It was fear of himself and his own inadequacies that had let him look up into his father’s single disapproving eye and then simply let go to fall into the abyss. It was stubbornness and desperation that had finally made him relent under the Chitauri’s hands, after his mind had been cracked open and rearranged; it was a puzzle no one had been able to piece together, and so the Other had simply stopped trying and instead created an entirely new picture in which to slot the tattered remains of Loki’s thoughts and memories, disjointed and poisoned as they were. 

It was greed and ambition, back by that same desperate effort just to _survive_ , that drove Loki to Midgard, to grind it under his heel. The people of Asgard would never accept him as their king, and now, after it became clear what he had done to Thor, after they knew what he _truly_ was, they would never accept him even as a presence in their realm, or at least as nothing beyond a spectacle, a relic of an old war which manifested as the reminder of equally old grudges and childhood nightmares. 

The people of Earth, though, easily manipulated humans, would fear him at first, yes. But once they saw what he had done, once they understood the danger he had saved them from, that he had come to be their protector against a far worse threat, then they would welcome him as their king. 

But as with most of Loki’s plans, those, too, had scattered to the wind like so much ash, ruined by a small band of heroes—and Thor, naturally, because Loki could never have _anything_ for himself without Thor insinuating himself into the whole affair. 

But perhaps . . . perhaps if he’d been treated as Thor’s equal from the beginning, perhaps he would not have resorted to such drastic measures to assert his place in Asgard. Perhaps he would not have led to the Bifrost’s destruction and been left to dangle from the precipice before dropping into what he fully believed at the time would be his death. Perhaps he never would have landed on that miserable rock the Other used as a makeshift Hel. No, not even that. This was more like the legends of the Christian Hell Loki had read about, a place of eternal torture for the wicked. 

And if he hadn’t landed there, his mind and spirit would not have broken under the centuries of torture (he knows, rationally, it could have been no more than months, a year at best, but time being relative and all . . .). He would never have come to Earth, or at least not under those circumstances. 

The Tesseract and the powerful stone within its casing would still be lost. 

Loki would not now be witness to the first stages of the unraveling of the universe. 

All started from the seed of a child’s sense of jealousy. 

Loki’s hands twitch at his sides, magic crawling just under the surface of his skin and fighting to explode outward instead of building to an increasingly uncomfortable heat. He watches, waiting for an opening, _any_ weakness he can exploit. He’s good at that, has always been good at that, but his mouth is dry and every cell in his body trembles as he looks upon the monster he knows in his heart is going to kill him. No illusions this time, no second or third chances, no last-second escapes. The Other warned him, when he was drowning in his own blood and gurgle-screaming pleas at the starless sky that he just be allowed to _die_ instead of being brought back yet again, that Thanos would not be pleased if he failed, and so Loki had to be made to understand how to fight the mind stone’s power. 

It had to take hold first, and Loki’s mind, chaotic as it was, was tightly woven and pristine. 

It had to be broken first before Loki himself could be made stronger. 

The Other had warned him, and Loki had nearly allowed himself to believe in the years since that the creature had only tried to frighten him with tales of some imaginary beast in the farthest reaches of a distant star system, a being of such unfathomable age that even Loki, a young god in his own right who had watched with curiosity in his youth as civilizations rose and fell on Midgard, could not quite understand the enormity. 

_There will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he cannot find you._

Loki realizes how he had been a fool, then as now, to ever think the Norns had let him slip the bonds they had trapped him in with their tapestries. 

They are lost. Their ship is destroyed, their people slaughtered. Even the Hulk has been spirited off to who knows where, if the beast even yet lives, and Heimdall has paid for his last heroic act of defiance with his life. 

All that remains is the smoke and fire and the choking sensation as the air thins around them. 

And him, the Mad Titan who has brought all this destruction upon them. 

Loki remains vigilant, defiant, determined to die with honor at least _once_ —or, more accurately, to make Thanos at least _work_ to kill him. 

Banner is gone. Thor has been brought to his knees, made to kneel at Thanos’s side, and the sight of it makes bile rise in Loki’s throat. 

The Titan continues to stroke Thor’s head like a beloved hound, and it takes all of Loki’s remaining patience not to pull a dagger from nothing, again and again, until one finally finds its target and buries itself in one of Thanos’s life-sustaining arteries. No—he wants to jump upon the monster’s back and drag a dagger across the Titan’s throat himself, feel skin and muscle giving way in a slick wash of blood, only stopping when the blade lodges into bone and the head is nearly severed and able to come away with just a few good pulls. 

But he can’t. All he can do is watch, held back by these wretched minions and made to sit with his own failures as Thanos crushes the Tesseract in his palm. That blasted little cube that has cost Loki so dearly, which has haunted thoughts since it first came into his life and which still burns like blue flames behind his eyelids every time he tries to sleep, dissolves to nothing in Thanos’s grasp, splintering into fragments of unremarkable glass. 

The space stone previously held within its confines glows just as brightly, hovering there above Thanos’s palm before it too is slotted into place on the gauntlet. Loki shudders, an echo of the stone’s power calling to him as the only other being in this universe which has managed to wield it with any degree of control. And for what? To bring Thanos to Midgard and closer to his goals?

He watches for as long as he can while the monsters converse amongst themselves before he finally emerges from his hiding spot. If he’s to die here, he won’t do it cowering in the shadows. And since his original plan with Banner has failed . . . 

He’s very careful not to look at Thor as he approaches. 

“If I might interject,” he begins, all false cheer. The lie of a lifetime. “If you're going to Earth, you might want a guide. I do have a bit of experience in that arena.” 

Thanos tilts his head slightly, an almost amused look crossing his face. “If you consider failure experience.” 

Such a simple retort shouldn’t rattle him, but Loki bristles anyway, having been knocked astray temporarily from the speech he’d planned so carefully in his head. 

“I consider _experience_ experience.” 

Failure or success, he still knows more about Midgard and its defenders—and how to rally them against a common enemy. 

The mask never slipping, even for all Loki’s mind is screaming at him to grab Thor and run, he steps forward. “Almighty Thanos, I, Loki, Prince of Asgard . . .” He trails off, glancing over at Thor. A masterful play, he thinks, a shining lie (if it is still one at all). “Odinson . . .” He looks back at Thanos, chin tilting up in defiance unbecoming one offering fealty. “The rightful king of Jotunheim, God of Mischief . . .” 

He calls the blade silently, without so much as a twitch of his finger to give the game away. 

“Do hereby pledge to you my undying fidelity.” 

With lightning-quick movements, fast enough to have already dropped any other foe, he lashes out, the point of the blade aimed unerringly at the softest, thinnest part of Thanos’s throat. Loki knows that area well, trained his bladework on countless dummies as a youth in Asgard. 

The blade halts just millimeters from its target, a numbing chill spreading along Loki’s outstretched arm as the space stone’s energy halts his movement. He knows this sensation, too, and it makes his head swim, dizzy with remembered power and cold with terror—not of Thanos, not of what he believes are his final moments, but of the empty vastness of space, of falling for centuries with nothing but his own hollow screams to reassure him that he _is_ still alive.

“Undying,” Thanos repeats, smirking. “You should choose your words more carefully.” 

Loki is helpless to act (no, not _helpless_ , never that, but perhaps frozen in fear) as the dagger is taken from his hand and as he is lifted from his feet by an absurdly powerful hand around his throat. For whatever reason, his thoughts turn back to when he had been on the other side, lifting a little man who’d dared to crawl out of his tin can off his feet. He’d squeezed until he’d seen the Avenger’s lips turn blue, until he’d _felt_ bones shifting under his hand, just short of cracking and eventually snapping entirely. 

How ironic. He hopes that somewhere in the cosmos, Stark is getting a karmic laugh out of all this. 

Loki struggles, feet kicking aimlessly in what he knows is a futile attempt to free himself. He tries to call his magic to him, tries to summon it from the base of his spine where it sits like a constant low-grade ache that’s grown comforting over the years for its permanence, but even if cannot contend, not with the air being ripped from his lungs and his brain being starved accordingly. Spots dance in his vision, pinpricks of multi-colored lights that distort everything around him in shades of reds and whites. 

And then he surrenders. If this is to be his fate, so be it. He’s certainly cheated it often enough already. And he’s tired, so tired, and if he could only rest, just for a moment . . . 

The words that he forces out through his increasingly tight throat surprise him, though. 

“You will . . . never be . . . a god.” 

He expects that to be it. With the way Thanos’s head tilts at him, looking at him quizzically like a wolf hearing a sudden sharp noise, he expects the Titan to simply close his fist, and then that will be it. Just a quick jolt of pain, and then nothing. Perhaps he’ll be welcomed into Valhalla with this final act of bravery; perhaps it will be enough to make up for a life of treachery and betrayal. 

Perhaps he will see his mother again. 

But the end doesn’t come. Rather, he’s tossed aside like a child’s toy, hitting the ground with such force as to brutally knock whatever air remained in his lungs out. His neck, still partially crushed, leaves him feeling as though he is attempting to suck air through a pinhole; he rolls onto his side, wheezing at first before a painful cough sends him into an even more painful choking fit. The air _burns_ as it rushes back into his lungs, and his head feels as though it might split in two once blood and oxygen begin pumping back into his brain. 

“You may yet have your uses, godling,” Thanos points out, and Loki’s vision is clearing just enough to see the Titan’s boots coming into view. Weakly, he conjures another dagger—stubbornness, desperation, whatever is driving him—but doesn’t even get to lift his arm before one of those massive boots comes down onto his arm and _grinds_ , snapping the bones like brittle twigs. Loki screams, the noise echoing even amid the beeping machines and hissing steam of the ship, and Thanos _smiles_ at him. 

“You have heart.” 

More of Loki's own words come back to taunt him, and he could laugh under any other circumstances at the absurdity of it all and the realization that perhaps the Norns  _do_ have a sense of humor.

“To Hel with you,” he forces out through gritted teeth. Must _all_ his faults and failures come back to him now? 

Still unsteady from oxygen deprivation and now the pain and blood loss of his arm, which hangs now in two distinct pieces utterly disjointed at the elbow, he does little beyond mutter disapproval as he’s hauled up, strong arms under each of his arms. Thanos’s “children,” as he calls them, are at the Titan’s bidding as ever, holding Loki up and ready to be run through, he supposes. 

“You don’t—” His voice is harsh to his own ears, fighting around the compression of his larynx. Thanos turns to look at him, and Loki smirks, well aware what a deranged picture he must paint. He can feel the blood trickling from both corners of his mouth, and he knows there must be burst blood vessels in his eyes and a massive bruise on his throat. 

But when has death ever stopped him? 

“You don’t deserve that stone, and you can’t control it.” 

Thor, still muzzled and slumped at Thanos’s side and held only by the Titan’s grip in his hair, slats his eyes up at his brother, a wordless warning glance that Loki, naturally, does not heed. 

“They will destroy you.” 

His throat feels like he’s choked down shards of glass just to get the words out, but he’s satisfied nonetheless when Thanos’s infuriating grin fades, just slightly—but it’s enough for Loki to notice and to know he’s hit his mark. 

Thanos takes a step forward, dragging Thor with him, and Loki does not watch. _Cannot_ watch. He will not wince and show weakness. Not now. 

“You only ever wielded two of them, Asgardian, years ago, and even still your mind is shattered. You’re weak, just as weak now as you were then.” 

Loki’s gaze drops to his arm, the injury he _can_ see, and then turns back up at Thanos. “I’m still alive.” 

“For now, and only by my mercy.” 

Loki means to point out that, no, he doesn’t mean that. He means that for all of the torture carried out in Thanos’s name, for as many times as Loki recalls in his nightmares that he was torn apart by clawed hands, he’s still alive. He died many times on that forsaken rock, to be sure; electrocuted, drowned, burned alive, poisoned, dehydrated, starved, hanged, dissected, and then brought back by some sadistic healer over and over and _over_ again until he was finally deemed “worthy” of serving Him. 

He died, yes, but he is alive _now_. 

And he is _not_ Thanos’s servant. 

He _means_ to say all of that, but pain flares everywhere in his body as the blunt end of a stave crashes into the back of his left knee. He buckles, providing enough slack in the limb that the wielder of the staff—he thinks it might be Proxima, but he can’t see from this angle—drives her foot into the leg, snapping it with preternatural strength. 

A curse escapes his lips before he can stop it; a sob escapes when he feels an identical pain in the other leg, driving him down to his knees. 

“It’s a shame I don’t feel inclined to show the same mercy to your brother,” Thanos notes, positioning himself and his captive so that Loki is forced to meet Thor’s face, his one remaining eye bright and full of tears for his lost friends, their people . . . for him? Loki wonders.   

The mark from the power stone is still visible against Thor’s head, dark pink lines having burned deep scars racing up into Thor’s hairline. Blood is still dribbling from his mouth, soaking his beard and tracing an ever-widening path down his neck. 

For a brief period in his recent life, Loki thought this was what he wanted: Thor, broken, subjugated before him. Defeated.   
  
But those fantasies had never been like this, and even if they had, now that Loki has them made real before his eyes . . . 

He gasps involuntarily when Thanos shoves the power stone against the side of Thor’s head. Up so close this time, Loki can see the energy forcing its way through Thor’s skull, lighting up not only the previous lines but creating new ones. Thor’s one eye whites out the instant before he squeezes it shut, but Loki swears he can see pinkish-white light spilling out from underneath the patch covering the hole where the other eye should be. 

“Stop!” he cries, hating how . . . how _childish_ he sounds. He whips his head up to look at Thanos, eyes burning with tears and hatred alike. “I gave you the Tesseract!” 

“Yes,” Thanos agrees coolly, never once letting up with the stone. “After I had to come get it myself. I sent you to do a job, godling, and you proved yourself as weak and worthless as I’d suspected you were.” 

_Never good enough not good enough you don’t matter you’re not Thor—_

Every unkind word ever spoken to Loki, either directly or whispered behind his back as he passed through Gladsheim’s halls—oh, Gladsheim, how he longs to see those golden spires and gilded columns again!—suddenly rise to the surface of his mind, cutting just as deeply as they ever had. 

“I will—” His words are lost to the noise of Thor’s renewed screaming, guttural and _aching_ , and Loki tries to turn his head away, is stopped by a rough hand snarling in his hair (and this he _knows_ is Proxima) to twist his head forward again. Two black-clawed fingers slide over his forehead to pry at his eyelids, forcing them open. 

_You think you know pain?_

“I’ll serve you!” 

Thor begins to convulse, violent spasms as the energy overwhelms him. 

_He will make you wish for something as sweet as pain._

“I’ll serve you!” Loki cries again, straining against his captors to look away. They had broken him once, tortured him until he couldn’t even _think_ to disobey them. He could . . . he could do it again. He would submit, bow his head, if it meant . . . 

This is . . . this is too much. This is nothing like anything he’d wanted. He’d wanted Thor to acknowledge him as an equal—and yes, there had been a time when he’d have slid a dagger over his brother’s throat without hesitation. But he hadn’t been fully himself then, all thanks to this mad monster’s posturing and his other servants, the ones Loki had been beaten and manipulated into agreeing to join merely because he’d been given no other choice, not when even the option of death was taken from him. 

Thanos seems to consider that for a second or two, then leans his enormous body down, making Loki feel like nothing so much as a child facing down the very monster that left him shaking and crying in his bed until Thor or Frigga or a nursemaid managed to soothe him back to sleep. 

“I don’t believe you, liesmith.” 

The stone presses deeper, and Thor lets out the kind of cry that Loki knows, even if he makes it off this ship by some grace of the norns, he will never stop hearing every time he has a moment of silence for himself. He hears it less with his ears than he feels it in his bones, crawling through every pore and burrowing until it settles into his muscles, into his cells, as much a part of him as his magic. 

_Norns,_ he thinks, gathering up every bit of that magic he can still reach and even some he can’t, hairs standing on end as the seiðr responds to him and embraces him like an old lover. _Weavers of fate. I call on you, on your wisdom, on your power. Help me. Asgard’s last remaining sons need you._  

A wind begins to blow to his right-hand side; Ebony Maw looks that direction, curious, but then turns his disgusting face back to the show at hand, disturbingly entranced with what he sees. 

_Frigga. Mother. I call on you, on your ancestors and all the magic in your line and all the witches in your name. Asgard’s— **your** sons need you._

There’s a sudden clearing of his vision, a clarity he’s only barely grasped before with his sorcery; like mercury, like quicksand, it’s always slipped away the moment he tries to wrap his fingers around it and absorb it into his mind, but now— _now_ it sticks, burning through his blood and lighting his veins with ancient power he’s long craved but never known how to wield. 

_Yggdrasil, I call on you, on your boundless gifts from which we draw our lives and our gifts. Please. **Please**._

As if every witch and sorcerer Frigga had thrilled him with stories about in his youth, as if every creature of any magical talent had heard him, Loki’s eyes snap wide open. The secrets to the universe are there for the taking if he only cares to look, as the ship exterior slides out of his vision and replaces itself with what he can only liken to an abstract vision of a great tree, twisting and burning at its roots; he wants to weep, for he knows well what this vision means. 

The roots begin to twist, crawling toward him, and he allows them to take hold of him until he is nothing but the same fire consuming them, reborn and ageless at once. His entire body burns, and words that aren’t his own, which don’t exist in any language he has ever heard and which not even the All-Speak can translate for him, tumble freely from his mouth in a voice he doesn’t recognize. It’s a spell, at least; he’s cast enough in his long life to know the feeling intimately. It makes his blood sing and his breath quicken in ecstasy, an ancient dance to which he somehow knows every step despite never hearing the tune. 

He’s only distantly aware of Proxima attempting to strike him. Her staff reverberates from an invisible shield, and when he looks at her, _something_ must have changed about him to make her recoil before she steadies herself. 

He’s weightless, lighter than air—and floating, he notices somewhere in the back of his mind, somehow having broken his captors’ hold—and yet he feels the weight of a thousand worlds in his chest, all of the Great Tree’s branches weighed down and folding in on him for protection. 

The breeze from before becomes a gale whipping through the ship, forcing Corvus to throw up an arm to prevent a broken piece of metal from slicing through his head. It takes a chunk of arm with it instead, and Loki is grimly satisfied—but not enough. 

He locks eyes with Thanos, the Mad Titan not seeming afraid so much as puzzled. 

“You should have killed us all,” comes the multitude of voices from Loki’s mouth, voices he doesn’t recognize, and he surrenders to them and the unendurable power coursing through him. It finally bursts free, surging from his hands in a palpable blast of golden energy that sends Thanos flying backwards against the far end of the Statesman. Ebony Maw gasps and wastes a precious split second to hesitate between tending to his master and attacking what is turning out to be a much greater threat than anticipated, and Loki seizes on the opportunity, telekinetically pulling the steel cage trapping his brother free and sending it flying at Maw. The creature has enough wherewithal to dodge the worst of it, but not enough to prevent a direct hit. 

“Loki,” Thor coughs, lone eye bloodshot and still regaining its normal color but no less wide with shock. He’s . . . _awed_ , Loki realizes, awed and _afraid_ , and the knowledge of seeing such fearful wonder directed him makes him howl with renewed vigor. 

“Asgard is a people,” Loki rasps, his own voice just barely detectable above the cacophony of others, both male and female clamoring to be heard at once. He aims his outstretched hands at Thanos as the Mad Titan brushes away the pile of debris he’d landed in. “And you have angered us all.” 

Thanos smirks and takes a step forward, only to meet a solid, invisible wall that pulses golden light for a moment where it is hit. Loki stares, unseeing and yet seeing _everything_ , back to the beginning of the universe, it feels, back to the first atoms coalescing, and he imagines them in Thanos’s blood, plucking them out one by one until he finds the combustible oxygen. 

He smiles, sharp and cruel, as green flames erupt first _in_ Thanos and then push through the surface, igniting him with arcane fire that sweeps up and outward. It curves back and over the invisible shell that’s formed over himself and Thor, seeking out the servants. And oh, Loki thinks, if _this_ is truly how he is to leave this life, bringing chaos and fire and destruction down on everything that would harm him, if _this_ is what his life has led to all along, then he can’t mourn its brevity. 

“Your seiðr is a part of you,” Frigga had told him often during their lessons, even when she first began teaching him simple sleight of hand and glorified party tricks to entertain others. “Just as it’s a part of Yggdrasil Herself. It can never be taken from you so long as you draw breath and Yggdrasil exists. But it is not free. The more you ask of it, the more it will demand from you.” 

She had told him stories—warnings, he used to think—about sorcerers so convinced of their own genius and ability that they had been driven mad by exposing themselves to dark magicks and secrets they were never meant to learn. She told him, he always supposed, because she did not trust him, just like everyone else, or perhaps she doubted his ability to control his sorcery and not let it consume him. 

But now—oh, what a fool he had been, what a twice-damned _fool_ that it’s taken him so long to understand. 

She _had_ been warning him, but not because she thought he couldn’t handle it—but because he _can_ , because calling upon the power of all the witches who had come before him, of all the raw magical energy Yggdrasil had to spare, is _intoxicating._

She told him because she had known, on some level, what her fate was to be and what Loki’s, too, is now. She had been _preparing_ him, not trying to discourage him, and he could weep if he had but a moment’s pause to consider it all.

He can feel his mind splitting open again, not entirely unlike how the Chitauri had cracked it open and how the mind stone’s power had slotted inside, threading through every nook and cranny and tainting every thought and memory he’d ever held in his brain. There are too many secrets, too many people, too much _power_ surging through him; he _is_ a god now, he knows it, and if he could just touch the heart of Yggdrasil before him, weakened and endangered but pulsating still, calling to him like a beacon, if he could just hold it in his hands, if— 

He can feel his body beginning to splinter as well, cracks forming in his skin with the force of the energy necessary to keep himself and Thor safe from the continued attacks to the barrier. Thanos is reaching a mighty fist through it, about to breach it, teeth gritting in obvious pain from the flames searing the flesh from his bones. 

“You will not win this,” says a voice not his own with a tongue he can’t even say for certain is still his at all. The words herald a supernova blast that pours from his hands, his eyes, his mouth, filling the ship’s cabin with blinding white-gold light that sends Thanos and his children flying again, scattered throughout the Statesman. 

The light fades, and Loki notices that he has fallen to his knees, trembling violently, dark veins standing out in sharp contrast against his deathly pale hands. 

Thor is still watching him, only now recovering from the power stone’s effects, and he seems . . . _afraid_ , still, reaching out to grasp Loki’s shoulder but stopping just short of doing so. 

“Loki,” he whispers, face drawn in horror. “Loki, what did you do?” 

The wind is gone. The barrier has fallen. The flames, only ever the product of sorcery in the first place, are extinguished. And Loki— 

He falls forward against Thor, his brother’s arms all that keep him from collapsing entirely. 

Thor’s voice is still desperately ringing in his ears, encouraging him to get up (on broken legs, no less), but Loki is so distant now, so _beyond_ that, and so very tired.  
  
He can feel the presence of every mage to ever step foot on Asgardian soil, so much sorcery now imbued in _him_ —or it _had_ been for a few painful, blissful moments. The entire universe had been his to claim with all its secrets and all its power and the minds and hearts of every witch and sorcerer Yggdrasil had ever touched, and he wanted to sink into it, to let his mind fall open and absorb it all, to sink into those roots . . . 

“Loki, please. Please, don’t leave me,” he hears from somewhere. It sounds like Thor’s voice, but that can’t be. They are on different planes now, not just different galaxies. A hand is pushing his hair back from his face, a caress too rough to be his mother’s, but he knows it to be her hand nonetheless, knows those kind eyes and gentle smile watching him. 

_Have I made you proud, Mother?_  

Every bitter word, once again, coming back to him. 

He hears shouting and broken steel crunching underfoot as their would-be overlords come rushing back into the area. Thor, from somewhere in another solar system, urges him to stay awake, to come back, to _do something_ , yet all he can do is stare at what he _knows_ is the ceiling of the ship but which he only sees as the end of the cosmos and the final point of all time and everything that is. 

_You have made me proud, my boy,_ he hears, clear and close, and he nearly sobs when between one breath and another, he catches the scent of lavender and roses, the same he has always associated with his mother’s beloved gardens where she taught him so much of his magecraft. 

_I have but one more gift to share with you_. 

Something like an electrical shock goes through him, beginning in his breast and spreading outward with the next beat of his heart. A golden light whites out everything around him, and then he is soaring, something still like Thor’s arms wrapped tightly around him. 

He is free.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki is alive. Against all odds, against even the Norns' wishes, perhaps, he is alive. 
> 
> Now begins the task of figuring out how -- and why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not every chapter will be 5k+ words. Probably. I hope.
> 
> God, I hope.
> 
> ANYWAY, thanks, all, for the kind words and encouragement! I love hearing from you and discussing theories with everyone, so feel free to leave a comment if you don't mind me jabbering back at you.
> 
> And a note specific to this chapter: _italicized dialogue_ indicates telepathy. You'll see why that's important shortly.

The warm glow doesn’t linger. Loki doesn’t know when it disappears, exactly, but he knows he feels chilled and hollowed out in its absence. He’s also vaguely aware, somewhere deep in some barely conscious pocket of his mind, that he’s no longer floating. 

Rather, Something metal and flat is against his back. He taps his fingertips against the surface and gets a satisfying physical feedback, something solid, something _real_ , and he wonders if he is still aboard the Statesman. But no, he had seen it—he _thinks_ he saw it—obliterated, cracked apart and ripped to shreds by . . . was it Thanos? Was it him? 

He doesn’t know, nor does he _care_ to know. He knows he isn’t there _now_ and that what was there is lost, but he is himself again. 

As if he’s trapped underwater, he can make out muffled voices in the distance—no, closer, very close to him, and supposes he should continue to listen to try to make out what they’re saying before he reveals that he’s awake (or even alive). 

Thor. He hears—he could weep—he hears _Thor_ , his brother’s voice a familiar rumble like the thunder he brings with him wherever he goes, reverberating deep in his chest and practically rattling everything around him. There are other voices, several of them, some of them female, but none sound particularly threatening. That’s a nice change of pace. 

He focuses on the seiðr still thick in his veins, but sluggish now instead of moving like a raging torrent of long-repressed ability and rage. It feels like his own again, but his body still feels odd, as if— 

He tries to move and groans. Oh. Right. He’s operating with only one of four limbs not shattered into pieces. 

“—the other pirate-angel baby over there?” 

“That is no pirate-angel baby. That is . . . that is like a weasel.” 

“Just a weasel?” 

“In leather, yes. A lot of leather.” 

Loki forces his eyes open and tries to sit up, still groaning, and immediately regrets it when the world spins and then tilts around him. 

“—do well to stop mocking my brother,” he hears from Thor as the voice gets closer. With his eyes screwed shut against the painful light of the ship, against _any_ light which might be there, he jumps reflexively when he feels a hand against his chest, more of a gentle suggestion than anything as it pushes just enough to encourage him to lie back down. 

“Loki.” Thor sounds—he sounds _relieved_ , and of course he is; he still hasn’t learned not to rejoice at the merest hint Loki might not be plotting his demise at any given moment. If he had the energy to do so, Loki thinks, he might summon a dagger to press against Thor’s throat, just a simple warning not to get _too_ comfortable. 

Loki opens his mouth, half-afraid of the multitude of voices that might spill forth, but his throat is dryer than he can ever recall feeling it, even worse than an especially terrible illness he remembers from childhood when he could only eat ice chips and some sort of disgusting gruel that Eir had sworn had healing properties. 

“Shh. It’s all right, Loki. We’re . . .” He can tell from the change in direction of Thor’s voice that his brother is looking around, likely taking stock of their surroundings and whoever else is nearby. “Among allies. I think.” 

“Hey! What do you mean, you _think_? I let you on my ship, didn’t I?” 

“I am Groot!” 

“No, it was _not_ your idea. You better stop with this new lying habit, or so help me—” 

The voices become muffled again, much to Loki’s gratitude; his head feels as if it might burst at any second, as if any slight movement might split his skull wide open and spill brains and starlight everywhere. A fanciful image, that, and he imagines he could pluck the stars directly from his mind right now if he so desired. 

“Rest, brother,” Thor all but coos, and it’s so sickeningly kind that Loki _really_ mourns his sorcery being weakened so that even calling a blade to him, a trick he’d learned as a fledgling mage, seems beyond him now. 

And Thor, oblivious as always, continues. 

“You’re still badly injured. There are no healers aboard this vessel, but we’ll . . .” He trails off again, and Loki wonders at the sound. He is unused to hearing Thor express doubt at all, much less about himself or show any kind of insecurity; it’s unsettling, and it sticks in his side as an unwelcome thorn. “We’ll fix that.” 

He’s smiling. Loki _knows_ he’s smiling, can hear it in his voice and imagine the optimistic look Thor is directing at him. 

Loki opens his eyes to try to look, and he gets just a glimpse of that boundless optimism before he sees Thor’s smile melt into open-mouthed shock. And what’s more, Loki is almost certain he can see the molecules under the skin moving to form that expression, can see the particles in the air as Thor breathes, can see beyond what he knows to be the wall of the ship and out into the ancient dust clouds of long-dead star systems. 

“Loki, your eyes. They’re—” 

Loki flinches away from the fingers, however delicate (which isn’t all that much anyway, given his company), which touch the side of his head. 

 _They’re what_? He tries to get out, but the words catch in his throat, unable to make it past the sandpaper and broken glass. Oh, yes. He supposes he’ll need to repair his throat along with all his other various ruined body parts. Lovely. 

A blink and then the vision clears. The dim lighting around them is no longer intolerably bright. The wall of the ship is intact again, no longer just a suggestion of a shape he feels as though he could _think_ out of existence. 

Thor is still looking at him as though he’s just crossed paths with a ghost, but he forces a tight smile again and shakes his head. 

“A trick. Whether from you or my own mind, I can’t tell. No matter. You can tell me about it later, along with what in Bor’s name you did on that ship. I’ve never seen anything like it—from you or _anyone_.” 

Loki can’t very well explain what he doesn’t understand himself, but he nods anyway, just once in case the vertigo decides to return. 

“I also don’t know what you did to get us here,” Thor goes on, and Loki silently curses him. He’s so _very_ tired. Won’t Thor just let him _sleep_? “But there was—this sounds mad, I know, but I _swear_ to you, Loki, I smelled flowers, like what Mother kept in her garden, just before you collapsed. There was a flash of light, and then . . . then we were here.” 

Loki doesn’t know where here is or how he and Thor have gotten here, and when he tries to ask, his throat closes up again, trapping his words behind his teeth. Thor frowns and shakes his head, reaching out to place his hand against the top of Loki’s head, thumb brushing a spot in the center of his forehead. It’s so very sweet, and Loki wants to _scream_ from it all. 

Perhaps Thanos was right. He’s gone weak. Maybe he was _always_ weak. 

“Your neck was almost snapped, Loki, and your throat crushed. Please don’t try to talk yet. Give yourself time to heal.” 

“No . . . time,” he forces out at last, and even those simple words bring tears to his eyes, though he stubbornly refuses to give them the satisfaction of release. Instead, he lets his eyelids shut to contain the dampness, then reaches out with his mind, following threads invisible to the naked eye and to anyone without his particular talents. These threads, like so many others in his life, lead back to Thor, but Loki won’t dwell on them. 

Thor’s mind has always been an open book to him; his brother has never been secretive or quiet with his feelings, and his thoughts have always been loud, boisterous, and oppressive. Loki still recalls developing terrible headaches in his youth when he first began learning the craft of mind-reading. _Telepathy_ , he thinks the mortals call it; he read it in one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. files Barton got for him what seems a lifetime ago. 

Those early attempts were instructive, if nothing else. Thor’s mind was wide open, even more so in their youth. But for a fledgling mage, learning how to enter another’s thoughts was the easy part; keeping those thoughts from filtering into his own consciousness was another matter entirely. 

He hasn’t done this in quite some time, hasn’t _wanted_ to tread into Thor’s mind since he stopped being young enough to do so just to uncover secrets he could hold over his brother’s head to win favors. _Let me go with you to Vanaheim or I’ll tell Mother you broke her jewelry box playing with that stupid hammer._ Loki catches himself smiling faintly at the memory before it, too, is wiped away like smoke clearing from a dying fire, making room for him to push past Thor’s pitifully weak mental defenses—though they have, he notices, gotten considerably stronger than before. Not by choice or training, it seems, but by something he can only liken to scar tissue, crude but admirably strong walls erected to guard against pain he doesn’t know how to mend. 

If Loki patches up the cracks in the walls as he goes, providing just a little reinforcement, Thor doesn’t have to know. 

Heimdall’s last pained grunt as the blade is driven into his heart. The groans of the dying. Children screaming and crying before they, too, are slaughtered without hesitation. A frantic distress call. 

Thor’s thoughts are all over the place, disjointed and frantic, painted in grief, rage, shock, horror. But at the forefront, more than any other, is . . . 

It’s him. 

Loki’s brow furrows, watching from Thor’s perspective as he’s lifted from the ground in the Mad Titan’s grasp. He hasn’t yet seen himself with his own eyes, but he sees for the first time what he must look like: bloodshot eyes, pronounced veins, and, he sees when his remembered self falls to the ground, a throat that looks like an eggplant partially crushed by careless feet running through Mother’s garden. 

He sees himself in another angle now, legs collapsed beneath his weight, unable to support him any longer, his arm bent unnaturally. And he sees . . . he sees the light of the power stone reflecting on his own face, sees his eyes welling with tears and his teeth bared in a snarl. 

He sees himself weep, even though he has no memory of tears on his cheeks. 

And now, at last, he sees what Thor must have seen: his irises are swallowed by gold, shimmering and sparking, that spreads from the center outward to cover his eyes fully. Green tendrils of energy crawl over—no, _under_ his skin, streaking his flesh a sickly yellow-green hue. 

He slips away from Thanos’s children, battered body still misshapen and limbs still hanging limply but for his one good arm, but the seidr turned manifest is everywhere, sparking green and gold energy from every point as he hovers in the air. Flight has never been one of his talents, but born aloft on the energy pouring out of him, responding to his unconscious desires to reshape reality for his benefit, he thinks he might reconsider and devote himself to learning more about that particular trick. 

He looks like a god. 

And when he opens his mouth to speak, when voices of long-dead witches and what must be the life’s sound of Yggdrasil Herself come out of him, all layered atop one another, he thinks he must _sound_ like a god as well. 

But he isn’t here to look for memories ( _“Shh, Hildi, don’t cry, don’t cry, please, don’t cry, don’t let them hear—” “For Asgard!” “My daughter!”_ and no, no, he can’t, he mustn’t, he doesn’t _want_ these memories, and he considers taking them from Thor as well to save him the misery of hearing his subjects’ last words echo for the rest of time). He only needs to speak. 

 _“Where has Thanos gone?”_

Thor winces and reaches up to push the heel of his hand into the space where his right eye once rested. “Damn you, Loki. You know how I hate when you do that.” 

 _“Yes, I do.”_ Loki grins slightly, though without his usual malice darkening it. _“But I don’t have any other options. You’ll survive. Now. Where is Thanos?”_

Thor still seems like he might argue, but he relents after a few seconds and shakes his head. “I—I don’t know. I remember only a bright light, and then we were outside our ship. When I woke, we were here.” 

 _I have but one more gift to share with you._  

Frigga’s voice rolls around in Loki’s brain, just as clear as it had been before, as it had been in life, and he wants to know, _needs_ to know what it means. Was he the source of the light? Was it Thanos? Had Mother returned from Valhalla long enough to help them? 

But his more pressing concern—oh. Oh, no. His stomach twists into a painful knot, and the sudden sharpness of his thoughts must be very loud indeed, given how Thor flinches again and drops his head. 

 _“Did Thanos escape?”_  

“I don’t—” 

 _“Think, you idiot. **Think.** Did you see him escape? What did you see, Thor? I’ll pry it from your worthless skull myself if I must.”_

One angry blue eye turns up toward him, but Thor is thinking. Loki can feel his thoughts churning, a different frequency from his own and grating, but churning nonetheless. 

“I saw the flash of light, and then I felt we were being pulled? But just before, I saw . . . I saw him, and the ship—” 

Thor’s face suddenly drains of color, and Loki can _feel_ the thoughts rushing out like a tidal wave threatening to pull him under and drown him under the weight of it all. Loki has just enough time to pull his mind back and try to shore up Thor’s failing mental defenses before he drags _both_ of them down, but even now, pushing back against the wave with all he has, Loki trembles with the sheer _force_ of Thor’s grief aimed directly at him. 

Memories still seep through, despite Loki’s best efforts to seal up every exit point, and he’s inundated with blurry snippets of thoughts: of a bright pink-white light arcing through the Statesman, of a deafening explosion, of looking down and back as what little remains of the ship is torn apart. 

He sees—by the Tree—he sees _bodies_ floating among the rubble, some of them dead already, others choking for air, and a part of Loki, the part that had thought once he’d wanted Asgard under his heel, twists and cries out. He sees from Thor’s perspective a young boy, perhaps only a couple hundred years old, still very much a child by their standards, frozen in place, arms still wrapped around his mother. He sees an elderly couple, both still bleeding of their wounds, the old man contorted in a feeble attempt to shield his wife from the murderous nightmare creatures. 

He sees a servant girl, a pretty young woman he recalls as one of his mother’s handmaidens. She is very near Loki in age, and though it’s been some time, he believes she is one of the first he ever kissed. She had always been kind to him, never seeming to believe or even notice the vicious court rumors that circulated about him. She had even visited him once when he was imprisoned in the dungeon following his failed attempt to gain control of Midgard—just the once, as he’d been vicious and cruel for no reason other than to lash out. She’d left in tears, and Loki had taunted her and cursed her the entire way until she disappeared from view. 

He hadn’t spoken to her since that, had not seen her, hadn’t even known she was aboard the Statesman, only to then die at the hands of a different monster than the one she’d had the misfortune to befriend. 

He sees her in the debris, eyes frozen wide in terror and left to stay that way for the rest of time as she drifts through space with the rest of her people. 

 _He will make you wish for something as sweet as pain._

Something like a mangled sob catches in his throat, and he turns his head angrily to the side before Thor can try to offer whatever clumsy gestures he may in sympathy. 

But no. Thor is . . . Thor is lost, if Loki is free to judge by the rapid-fire memories battering at the edges of his mind. 

“They’re all gone,” Thor murmurs at last, his voice barely above a whisper and so unlike anything Loki has ever heard from his brother that he must turn back to face him, eyebrows pushing in toward each other. “They’re . . . they’re gone. My— _our_ people. Thanos slaughtered them all, and then—” 

He draws in a sharp breath, and Loki closes his eyes, already aware of what’s going to come next. 

“Loki, he has two of the stones.” 

 _“Yes.”_  

There can be no thunder in an area with no atmosphere, yet Loki can _smell_ lightning in the air and hears rumbling somewhere in the distance. He’s too familiar with those sensations to mistake them for anything else or to miss them when they surface. 

He watches as Thor stands from where he’d been kneeling at Loki’s side the past several minutes and marches off to launch into an angry tirade with the other inhabitants of the ship. Which, now that Loki thinks about it, he doesn’t recall even seeing. He feels like sighing (and would if his throat worked properly) as Thor starts bellowing in his usual blustering way, demanding a pod to pilot himself. 

“You don’t look like brothers,” comes a sweet, almost melodic voice, and Loki cranes his neck (regrets doing it but does it anyway) to see a small woman in green watching him, twisting her fingers together. She has . . . antennae? Not the oddest thing he’s seen, not by any stretch, but it’s unexpected enough to get his eyebrows to lift a little higher than normal. 

 _“We’re not.”_  

“—can’t just let you take with my ship and my crew—” 

“I don’t _need_ your crew, Quail. I want only a pod for my brother and myself. And perhaps the rabbit, who seems to be the only other creature on this cursed ship that appreciates the danger—” 

“It’s _Quill._ ” 

“And I’m not a rabbit.” 

The voices die down again, and Loki lets out as much of a sigh as his ruined throat can manage. 

 _“We’re not . . . biological brothers."_

“Oh. So you’re . . . a pet?” 

Loki doesn’t know why that’s the conclusion she immediately jumps to, but it makes him laugh despite himself, even if it has a bitter edge, and even if the act makes the glass shards in his throat scrape through the tissue even more. 

 _“After a fashion. Though not **his** pet, I assure you.”_

Another woman comes into view then, making Loki squint as he looks her over. She is hauntingly familiar, like a face from a dream he could almost recall hours after the fact. She approaches cautiously, moving like a hunter, and he feels increasingly uneasy as she closes the distance to stand directly next to him. 

“You Asgardians are as tough as I always heard you were.” 

Loki says nothing and instead continues to study her face. He _knows_ that face. 

“You’re already healing pretty well. I don’t know _how_ , considering the extent of the damages, but your arm has set and is doing a lot better. You’ll probably be able to walk again in a few days.” 

 _“We don’t have days.”_

The warrior woman—and he can _sense_ that she is a warrior just from the way she carries herself, even if he couldn’t also see the variety of weapons strapped to her person—shakes her head, vivid magenta hair tumbling over her shoulders. 

“Probably not. But even your people can’t heal broken legs in a matter of hours.” 

Loki’s grin sharpens. _“You have no idea what my people are capable of.”_

If the woman takes his words in the vaguely threatening manner he intends, she shows no sign of it, instead merely checking some sort of monitor beside him. 

“Your brother tells me you’ve survived my father twice now. I think that gives me a very good idea of what you can do.” 

She casts a look at him, just a simple look, but it’s enough. The pieces slot into place, and Loki _knows_. 

Now, _now_ he remembers her, one of many shadowy figures in a world which seemed to consist of nothing else. But he remembers the hair and the green skin and being fixated on both, the only colors visible to him which weren’t the blue or black of the environment itself or the black and red of his own blood coating every inch of his skin, his clothing, his armor, the ground, the Chitauri’s talons, their weapons, their tools, their teeth. 

She had stood at Thanos’s side the one time Loki recalls having seen him before the encounter on the Statesman; the Other had always formed a buffer between them, but there had been one time when Thanos had insisted on visiting his new beast in person and checking on the Other’s progress in his attempts to break it down and rebuild it into something more usable. 

The woman had been there at the Titan’s side, expression unreadable. 

And now she stood near enough for Loki to see the markings on her skin and the prominent jutting of the bones in her face, the stitching in her leathers, the slight crease in her brow as she checked the monitor beside him again. 

Thanos had favored her. Loki had seen that in the way the monster had kept its voice low and calm in her presence and in the almost gentle touch of his hand atop her head. The _true_ child of Thanos, he’d learned later when the Other had mentioned it in passing. 

If Thanos truly meant to rip from Loki everything he had ever held dear . . . 

 _He will make you wish for something as sweet as pain._

It would not have responded if he’d tried to call on it to attack Thor, but he’s recovered enough to draw on his magic now. The familiar tingling sensation along his wrist and settling warm in his palm is like a lover’s caress, as is the cold metal blade which solidifies in his grasp. 

He should wait, think this through, draw her in for aid and then drive the knife home directly into her throat, but opportunity and a sudden release of long-caged fury combine to make him lash out immediately with a strangled growl. He stabs wildly, blindly, at the nearest part of her he can reach, practically hissing when the dagger slides through the sleeve of her jacket, just barely grazing the skin behind it. He tries again, but his body is still too weak and too disoriented trying to heal itself to let him move with his usual liquid grace. 

The woman snarls and steals the dagger from his grip, tossing it deftly to grip it by the hilt and then turn it on him. Loki holds up his hand in mock surrender, only to then slam the palm of it against her forehead, fingers curling like claws against her skull. 

Before her memories can overwhelm him, he shuts the path, instead forcing his own—or Thor’s, and they’re so hard to separate now—to flood into his mind. She goes stock still, eyes rolling back in her head as Loki pours image after image into her mind. He is curled protectively around himself, clutching at his stomach to keep his organs from spilling out onto the ground, and he can see her in the distance. He is burned and beaten and utterly ruined for her father’s pleasure while the Titan himself looks on with dispassionate interest, like he’s surveying a horse for potential purchase. 

Thanos is on the Statesman, his _other_ children cutting a blood swath through the ship and paying no mind to the screams and the mothers begging for their children’s lives before they are all run through on cruelly fashioned pikes purposely built for suffering. 

Thor is dying, his body being ripped apart by the power stone. 

Loki is dying as well, the air choked from his lungs and then the Great Tree’s power flowing through him, poisoned energy as it is, cracking his skin until whatever he might possess of a soul is glittering through the openings. 

He forces the woman to see, to _feel_ what her father had done. 

He shows her images stolen from Thor’s mind of bodies floating helplessly among the wreckage of the Statesman. 

He shows her Eira, the handmaiden whose only crime had been that she was too trusting; he shows the woman Eira’s beautiful face twisted into a grim mask of eternal terror, her long hair draped over her like a burial shroud. 

And then, because he _can_ , he dredges up a memory from the depths of his own psyche: the same woman but as a girl now, a halo of frizzy brown hair torn loose from a messy braid as she runs through the streets of Asgard, breathless and laughing and barely able to hold onto Loki’s own. He makes _sure_ the Titan’s daughter sees Loki as a nervous young boy pulling an equally nervous young girl into an alleyway to escape their pursuers (because even a prince can get himself into trouble, it seems, particularly when he’s disguised himself explicitly to remain anonymous). From the perspective of Loki’s memory, Eira’s face is flushed, either with exertion or anxiety, as she leans in to steal a kiss from the boy who is not her prince so much as her _friend_. 

It’s soft and sweet as any childhood kiss should be, but the memory distorts; when Loki pulls back and opens his eyes, the cherub-faced girl from before carries not the expression of a girl in the first blush of romance, but of one who has had the life stripped from her far too soon and in a terrible fashion. 

Hey eyes are open and accusing. 

“—your brother or I swear to God, I’m gonna blast a hole through his goddamn head right now.” 

“Loki!” 

Loki blinks, head swimming, as his hand is physically pried from the Titan’s daughter’s forehead. He practically growls, struggling futilely against Thor’s grip and wishing he had the use of his legs to get leverage against the table in order to fight back. 

“What are you _doing_?” Thor demands, easily pinning Loki’s wrist flat against the table. “These people came to our aid!” 

 _"Did they?"_ Loki all but spits directly into Thor’s mind, and he doesn’t care that Thor flinches reflexively at his brother speaking telepathically. " _She was there, Thor. Ask her how she watched her father supervise his creatures as they took me apart and killed me over and over just to bring me back and do it again. Ask her!_  "

Thor looks up at the green woman, whose temporary shock and disgust have given way to wild anger. 

“He says you watched Thanos torture him.” 

His voice is cautious, neutral, and if Loki had use of both arms, he thinks he might jab a thumb into the oaf’s remaining eye to blind him entirely. What sort of brother was he to even _pretend_ to consider giving her the benefit of a doubt? 

The green woman bares her teeth, every muscle in her body seeming to tense at once for a fight, but Loki, ever observant, sees the slightest wavering of her chin when she turns her attention from Thor to him. 

“How _dare_ you? What gives you the right to just—to just invade my mind like that?” 

Loki doesn’t answer, only gives her a nasty grin, and it’s only the one he believes is called Quill—who is still aiming a gun of some design at him with one hand—grabbing her arm that keeps her from lunging at him. 

“If you think I don’t know what my father has done to you, to others, you’re a fool,” she grits out. “Yes, I watched him. But you’ve faced him too. What did you want me to do? Try to fight him on my own?” 

The gateway into her mind is closing rapidly as she shores up the mental defenses he’d breached, but he slides through in order to speak to _her_ now as well as Thor. 

 _"That would have been a start."_

“Fight him for some freak who thinks he’s a god? Thanks, but no.” 

Quill smirks over her shoulder, but Loki ignores him in favor of pushing deeper into the green one’s mind, farther, slipping like a thief through the shadows of her thoughts until he finds just the right one to pull to the front. He knows he’s pulled the right string when her eyes go wide and her mouth drops open just a split second before she turns away. But Loki, emboldened by the tell, drives the point home, pulling to the forefront every scrap of a memory he can find buried in her skull from every murder she’s performed herself or stood idly by while watching Thanos go about his bloody work. 

_"He’d be so proud of you."_

“Stop,” she orders, voice barely audible and with a noticeable tremor underlying it. “I couldn’t have saved you. I couldn’t—” 

 _"Don’t insult me. You would not have done it even if you had been able. I’m not asking you to beg my forgiveness, daughter of Thanos."_  

“Then what do you want?” 

Loki grins again, splitting the not-quite-healed cuts in his lips and forcing fresh blood to the surface. 

 _"I want Thanos to suffer as he has made me suffer, and I want you to know that I will spill your blood gladly the first time the opportunity presents itself._ "

Thor, still privy to the conversation thanks to Loki lurking about in his brain as well, slams his brother's wrist against the table to get his attention. 

“Stop this, Loki. She did not ask to have such a father. No more than you asked for Laufey.” 

Oh. Oh, _that_ is deliciously brutal, and Loki is too impressed by Thor finally learning how to play by Loki’s own rules to be hurt. He grins again, slowly, almost beatifically. 

 _"No. But Laufey was not a madman seeking to reorder the universe."_ He pauses and lets his gaze slide sideways to the woman, still seething and watching him like she’s about to slip Quill’s grasp and stab him right in the heart. Best if he aims for hers first, then. " _And yet **I** still managed to rid the cosmos of **my** wicked monster of a father. Unlike some in this room."_

“I can rid it of you,” she shoots back with venom in her voice, and Loki would laugh if his throat was even capable of that much. 

“Okay, that’s it. Enough of this crap. Blondie, you can stay with us. Your shithead brother is goin’ out the airlock.” 

Loki glances around for the source of the voice, brow creasing when he sees a . . . is that a talking rabbit? Perhaps _none_ of this is real, he thinks. Perhaps Thanos killed him after all and this is all an especially disappointing afterlife or a vivid hallucination before he takes his final breaths. 

“Touch him and I will have your pelt as a cap,” Thor warns, and Loki thinks he might be grateful for the protection if he weren’t still so confused as to how a rabbit the size of a toddler was speaking to him. 

“Fine. I’ll shoot him from here. No touching necessary.” 

Thor moves closer to the rabbit, and whatever they are arguing is lost to Loki as he seizes his chance. He finds enough strength to conjure a dagger of pure magic, one that can’t be knocked from his hand, and flings it at the Titan’s daughter, aiming directly for her head. Whether it’s the light which gives him away or the movement, he doesn’t know; in any event, her sharp reflexes warn her in time to dodge the attack. The "blade" dissipates harmlessly before it connects with the wall behind her.

“You bastard,” she cries out, pulling her own blade--a real one, its silver glinting like an old friend Loki remembers well--and advancing on him like a powerful storm. 

“Sleep,” he hears, and the cool fingertips on his forehead are all he’s aware of before dropping into blackness.


	3. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has seen realms and creatures beyond his wildest imagination, but sometimes the place which baffles him above all others is his own mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't _planning_ on there being something like interludes in this story, but here we are. It's the fic that keeps on growing.
> 
> Thanks again, all, for your feedback! I'm still working on replying to everyone, but know that I read and gush over everything. :)

The first thing Loki notices upon waking is the grass tickling his nose. 

His face screws up as he takes stock of his surroundings. His mind is clear again and able to focus, but that in no way explains how he’s found himself in what appears to be a meadow. He blinks and forces himself into a seated position, marveling at his arm somehow being healed, and even more amazed that he can move his legs without pain. They don’t feel quite sturdy enough yet to fully support his weight, but there is a walking stick propped against the enormous ash tree providing shade for him against the afternoon sun. 

He leans heavily on it once he gets to his feet and begins to look around. A gentle floral scent wafts through the air, which he can only attribute to the ornate yellow flowers poking up through the tall grass. Gladsheim’s towers gleam in the distance in the early evening sunlight, and—ah. So he’s east of the palace, then. There’s the river bend curving gently around the the palace and carving a path through the meadow on the city’s eastern border.

Children laugh in the background, and after a moment he recognizes with growing confusion that it is _his_ voice he hears—and Thor’s. Startled, he spins as best he can while only being partially mobile, head swiveling as he seeks out the source of the noise. For a fraction of a moment, just as much time as it takes for him to blink, he sees himself, still just a boy, perched atop a boulder farther out in the meadow, gold glowing in his hands and misty green shapes forms emerging from his palms to settle on the ground. And Thor, standing next to him, eyes barely visible beneath a mop of blond hair that’s been bleached by the sunlight he never seems to leave, claps and laughs before poking a crude wooden sword at the illusory dragon Loki conjures for him. The mist dissipates into the air, only to be replaced by another Loki pulls from his imagination.

Then the scene vanishes, leaving ghost images behind Loki’s eyelids as if he’s been staring at the sun and now can’t clear the spots from his vision. 

“You were always so close when you were children.” 

Loki’s breath catches in his throat, and just this once, he knows it isn’t because of the still-healing bones and tendons crushed in Thanos’s hand. 

Slowly, as if afraid of startling a small animal if he moves too quickly, he turns to face the sound, steeling himself and refusing to let his face, stance, or anything else reveal the pounding of his heart in his breast or the way his mouth suddenly dries up as if made of sand. 

But Frigga can see right through him. She’s always been able to do so, and it never had anything to do with her abilities. 

She stands before him in the same teal and gold dress she was wearing the last time he saw her. Her hair is left to hang long and loose but for the carefully plaited ornamentation on top. She is still regal as ever, even in death, yet she smiles kindly at Loki, soft and warm as ever, and it’s all he can do not to reach out to her. 

He grasps the walking stick harder. 

Her skirts sway as she walks toward him, and as she draws nearer, she unclasps her hands and spreads her arms, the sleeves of her dress unfurling like banners until they just touch the tops of the grass blades. She waits expectantly, patiently, but Loki remains frozen. 

“You aren’t real.” 

If Frigga is hurt by his words, she shows no sign of it. Instead, she lowers her arms a little but leaves them open in a standing invitation, should her stubborn son change his mind. 

“Perhaps not. But your imagination is as vivid as ever, and you’ve always been able to pull your thoughts into creation.” She looks beyond him at the rock, her smile widening, and Loki thinks if he were to look he would find his childhood self entertaining Thor again with conjured holograms of even more beasts for him to pretend to slay. 

He does _not_ turn, though, and instead keeps his eyes locked on her. 

“I got Thor to safety, as you wanted.” 

That finally makes Frigga’s smile fade and a line form in her brow. She takes the final step toward him, close enough now to reach out, and Loki flinches despite himself when he feels her palm, warm and soft as the rest of her, against his cheek. 

“My darling boy. I didn’t share my gifts with you only for Thor’s sake. I did it for you.” She glances back over her shoulder at the palace before looking back at Loki, her tone a little sadder than previously. “And for Asgard. For all of us. I knew from the first time I held you that Thor’s fate would be entwined with yours, and yours with his, and _both_ of yours with Asgard’s.” 

Loki wants to sink against her hand, to pull her into a tight embrace and beg her forgiveness for whatever part he may have played—and he still believes it to be a crucial one—in her death. Instead, her last words having hit their mark, he looks down, unable to hold her gaze. 

“Asgard is destroyed, its people dead. It has no fate anymore.” 

“Then if that’s true, neither do you.” 

When Loki looks up, he sees Frigga tilting her head at him the way she always had to try to get his attention and encourage him to actually _see_ her. 

“The Norns have freed you, Loki. You called on them for aid, and they provided.” 

His eyes slide over to the walking stick, to the hand wrapped around it and the dark veins still standing out against his pale skin—not _his_ skin, he knows, but the only skin he is willing to acknowledge as his own. 

“I don’t understand, Mother,” he admits, voice just above a whisper even for as loud as it echoes in his ears. 

“You will. These gifts, these curses, these blessings . . . they take time. I didn’t understand myself at first, either. Why was I cursed to see the shape of the future but not enough to fully understand it or to change it? And I _did_ think of it as a curse, Loki. I did. But I let myself believe I was given my abilities for a reason. You need to believe the same of yourself.” 

He sees Eira floating in the void of space, her eyes still locked open in terror, as real and present as his mother before him, and he draws in a sharp breath that releases the image like one of his illusions into the atmosphere. When it clears, he gasps, surprised to see Frigga smiling at him again, only this time with blood trickling from her mouth and a dark red stain blooming across her midsection. 

“Mother . . .” 

“You’re beginning to see now, Loki. Don’t fear it. Embrace it. You’ll need your strength.” She reaches forward for the hand not leaning on the staff for support, rolling her thumbs across the knuckles. “And ours.” 

“Who—” 

“You invoked powers beyond your comprehension, beyond mine. They’re a part of you now, but remember what I told you as a child: Yggdrasil’s gifts are not free. She will demand a heavy price from you.” 

Loki’s jaw sets in determination. “And if I’m not willing to pay it?” 

Frigga’s smile turns sad as she reaches up to brush away a loose strand of Loki’s hair, tucking it behind his ear. “Oh, my darling. You’ve already begun to pay it.” 

“Loki! You tricked me!” 

“I was only having fun!” 

A childish peal of laughter Loki recognizes as his own from centuries before brings thunder in its wake. He closes his eyes against it, refusing the memories the privilege of manifesting. When he opens his eyes again, Frigga is gone, and the storm clouds have begun to cast shadows across the ground. 

And when he tilts his head back, expecting to see thunderheads gathering and lightning streaking overhead, he sees only stars in the velvet sky beyond the clouds.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki and Thor have a decision to make about where their paths are taking them -- and Loki, as always, refuses to take the easy one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two updates in less than 24 hours? Hey, stranger things have happened.

Loki wakes, as he has woken so often in his life, particularly of late, in pain. 

It isn’t the brutal pain of before, when he could _feel_ his broken bones fusing back into place. Nor is it the dull ache of injuries far enough along in the healing process to present more of a nuisance than anything else. 

No, this latest kind of waking pain is new: sharp and brittle and blossoming from his inside his skull until it feels as though his very brain is throbbing, and it’s all mirrored in the squeeze of his heart. 

He learned long ago not to open his eyes immediately as he regained unconsciousness. People are unguarded around those they believe to be deep in slumber; they say things not meant for his ears, often things he can turn to his advantage. And as the Chitauri had shown him, pretending to still be asleep (or dead) would buy him a few precious moments of peace before the tortures began anew. 

Carefully keeping his breathing as even as someone still lost in dreams, he lies and listens. Someone is milling about a few feet away to his left. Two voices, both of them male, are joined in conversation even farther on that side, their voices muffled by the distance. 

Thor is to his right. He knows it without even needing to open his eyes. He can feel the electric thrum of lightning in the air, which seems to be a part of Thor now more than ever. Loki knows that well; he’s been on the receiving end of it enough, both in jest and in earnest, to have let the energy settle in his bones as a background electrical hum, a constant reminder of the power Thor wields even without that ridiculous-looking hammer that, as far as Loki knows, is still shattered into useless debris somewhere on Midgard. 

“I know you’re awake, Loki. I know your tricks,” Thor points out, voice deep and low, much quieter than Loki is accustomed to hearing from his obnoxiously loud oaf of a brother. Still, he makes no effort to confirm the suspicions, so Thor just huffs and shifts. The noise of the rustling betrays that he’s sitting. “Fine. Then listen. I’ve told these people we’re taking the pod. We travel to Nidavellir. The tree and the rabbit are coming with us.” 

Loki thinks he might be losing his mind after all, but he stubbornly refuses to open his eyes and instead continues to listen. 

“The others are going to Knowhere. I’ve determined that that is where Thanos will be looking for the next stone.” He pauses, and Loki, even with his eyes closed, can still see the mildly amused half-smile tugging at Thor’s mouth. “I know you were the one who sent Sif and Volstagg there with the Aether. Father would have locked it away in the vault to guard it himself. It was a wise choice, and it worked for some time, but Thanos will be looking for it there now. And if he gets it . . .” 

Thor trails off for a moment, almost tempting Loki to give up the game and finally look at him. Almost. 

“There will be very little we can do to stop him. We will need better weapons. I will find Eitri and have a new Mjolnir forged. A better one. And you were the only one besides Odin to ever wield Gungnir. He could forge a new staff for you, and once you’ve imbued it with your own magic—” 

_“I’m going to Knowhere.”_  

He opens his eyes at last to see Thor staring at him in surprise. 

“You’re what? No. No, you’re coming to Nidavellir with me.” 

Loki licks his lips and tries to squeak out a sound. His voice is rough with disuse and the mostly-but-not-entirely healed damage to his throat, but at least he can speak now, even if his speech is raspy and coarse. 

“Did you mishear me? I’ll do as I please, Thor. With or without your blessing. Or your permission.” 

“But . . .” Thor grasps for the words, and Loki can almost imagine them floating in the air as Thor searches for exactly which ones will change his brother’s mind. It’s a futile effort, of course, but Loki can at least appreciate the effort. “Loki, I want—I _need_ you to come with me. I’ve lost you too many times. I very nearly lost you to Thanos once—” 

“Twice.” 

“—already. I won’t risk a third time.”

The green woman—Loki dimly recalls hearing someone call her “Gamora,” though he can’t remember now if it was someone aboard this ship or Thanos himself years ago—walks by, glowering at him the entire time. Loki waves cheerfully at her before redirecting his attention back to Thor. 

“It isn’t your risk to take.” 

“Loki, damn you.” Thor forces the words out on a growl, but there is pain and desperation in his eye, so much so that Loki _nearly_ regrets being the cause of it. “Why would you put yourself in his path again?” 

“Why are you only now trying to learn my mind?” 

“I’ve spent a thousand years trying to learn your mind,” Thor admits, the anger dropping out of his voice as quickly as it appeared, leaving behind only a strange kind of sadness that seems unsettling and out of place for him. “I have never succeeded. You’ve never let me.” 

“You haven’t tried hard enough,” Loki fires back with more venom in his tone than he truly means to convey, and he knows it when Thor winces and glances down at the table upon which Loki is stretched. 

“I’ve never stopped trying. Even when you’ve closed yourself off to me. I’ve never stopped, and I never will. What was it you told me? Satisfaction isn’t in your nature? Defeat isn’t in mine.” 

Loki sighs quietly. “Which is why you’re going to Nidavellir to craft a weapon that’s only going to get your fool self killed.” 

“Perhaps. But if I do nothing while I still can . . .” 

He doesn’t finish the thought. Rather, he stands and slides an arm around Loki’s shoulders, utterly ignoring the way Loki immediately tenses. He lifts, all but forcing Loki into a sitting position on the table. 

“Come. Your injuries will have to heal elsewhere. We need to go.” 

Loki rolls his ankles, both pleased and surprised when they only twinge with an old ache instead of the blinding pain of the splintered bones from before. He flexes his legs to test the muscles and finds the same of them, and his arm, crushed under Thanos’s foot, is still mottled with ugly bruises but moves easily under his command. 

“I’m not going. Not with you.” 

“Loki—” 

“I said no,” he continues, stern and relentless. Thor’s disapproving expression has no effect on him as he slides from the table to the floor, trying just part of his weight on one leg and then the other before finally standing. Everything still feels weak and out of place, and it still _hurts_ , but he can at least grit his teeth and get through it. 

“Look at you. You’re barely able to stand. You exhausted yourself on the Statesman. You don’t even have your magic to defend—” 

The long dagger that’s suddenly conjured from nothing to appear at Thor’s throat stops him mid-sentence, and his eyes travel the length of the jagged blade back along Loki’s arm and up to his brother’s cold stare. 

“You were saying?” 

Thor closes his hand around Loki’s wrist, gently lowering his arm enough so that the dagger is no longer so perilously close to his jugular. And Loki, for reasons beyond him, allows it. 

“You will not defeat him with your blades, Loki.” 

“And I don’t mean to.” He waves his hand, dropping the dagger back into the pocket realm he carries with him at all times to be ready at his need. He pulls the sleeves of his top down, glances at it for a moment, and then with barely so much as a thought calls his traditional armor back to him. Gold and green wash over him from head to toe until he is once again clad in his full armor, an imposing sight in all that thick black and green leather and heavy gold armor. His helm is there as well, and he grips it by one of the horns before placing it over his head. 

“I will defeat him with my ‘tricks,’ as you’ve always called them. You can thank me later after I’ve saved all of creation.” 

“You will die in the trying,” Thor points out, still uncharacteristically solemn, and Loki truly wonders when his brother stopped taking the bait of his words and actions. Even his illusions were proving to be unconvincing, if Sakaar was any indication. 

Maybe Thor can learn after all. 

“Then so be it. As you said, if I do nothing while I can . . .” He likewise trails off and shrugs, a slight grin pulling at his lips. “Defeat isn’t in my nature, either.” 

“Yo, pirate-god. You and the magic asshole here ready to roll?” 

Loki rolls his eyes and looks over to the source of the voice. “I’m not going anywhere with you, rabbit.” 

“Okay, seriously, what is wrong with—” 

Thor shakes his head. “He’s going to Knowhere with the others.” 

“Uh. The hell he is,” the one Loki heard called Quill objects. “I don’t really need to remind you guys he just tried to stab Gamora, right?” 

“Most of us have,” the large green man at his side points out, and he shrugs when Quill aims a sharp look at him. 

“Okay, but there’s also that weird Vulcan mind-meld bit. Are we just not gonna talk about that? Seriously?” 

“It’s called telepathy.” Loki levels him with a glare. “Truly, are _all_ Midgardians such simple creatures?” 

“What the hell did you just call me?” 

“Midgardian,” Thor supplies. “Earthling.” 

“Earthling—you know, sometimes I still forget I’m hanging out with a bunch of honest-to-god aliens.” 

“Enough! We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Loki interjects. “Thor, go to Nidavellir. I’m staying here.” 

Quill straightens his shoulders and adopts an odd accent. “You will not—” 

“Stop trying to sound like us. And you won’t stop me. I will take my vengeance upon Thanos, with or without you.” 

“You need our ship to get there.” 

“Yes,” Loki agrees with a wicked grin that forces his eyes to narrow. “But I don’t need the rest of you.” 

“Uh. Right. Okay. Time to go, Blondie. Say your goodbyes and let’s move. Quill . . .” The rabbit hesitates, then just throws a hand up in frustration. “Good luck. Shoot him if he starts shit. You know what to do.” 

Thor looks back at Loki, face drawn in unspoken pain—but the resignation written into every line and every scar tells Loki that Thor is past arguing with him over this. 

“You’re certain you won’t join us?” 

“I am.” 

Thor nods and then, before Loki can react, he pulls Loki into a tight hug, one arm firm around his midsection, the other curled up around his back so that his palm curved around the back of Loki’s head. 

“Take care of yourself, brother. I’ll be seeing you again.” 

Loki swallows hard and nods, thankful that Thor can’t see the slight sheen in his eyes. “Even if it’s in Valhalla?” 

“Especially there. If you make it there first—” 

“Never.” 

“—save me a seat.” 

“I’ll poison your drink and kill you again.” 

“I’d expect nothing less.” 

They pull apart, just enough for Thor to rest his forehead against Loki’s, hand still flattened against the back of Loki’s helmet. 

“I love you, Loki. Never doubt that. And please, for Bor's sake, stay safe. You're all I have left.” 

“I—” The words stick in Loki’s throat, and their refusal to leave is what eventually makes him swallow and nod. “Be well, brother. The Great Tree’s strength be with you.” 

“I think you’ve taken all of it for yourself,” Thor points out with a quiet laugh, and it’s unexpected enough that Loki shares a chuckle.

“I’m sure I’ve left some scraps for you.” 

“Hey, uh, this is all real touching. Seriously. Getting’ real misty-eyed over here. But can we hurry this the hell up?” 

Thor shoots an irritated look at the gun-wielding rabbit before looking back at Loki, and unlike Loki himself, he’s making no attempt to hide the tears in his eyes. He stays quiet, though, only gives a shaky smile and a final pat to Loki’s head before turning around and walking toward the pod with the rabbit and the tree. 

The three of them settle into place, and Thor turns that damnably conflicted smile toward him again. “I swear to you, Loki, we will do Asgard proud.” 

“I know.” 

The hatch opens and sends the pod barreling out the bottom of the larger ship. Loki stares into space through the hatch until the door closes again, and then he closes his eyes with a sigh. 

“You always have done.” 

He turns to see the rest of the crew—he supposes he’ll need to learn their names eventually just keep them straight in his head—watching him with varying levels of distrust. Accordingly, he throws his arms wide and grins. 

“Who’s ready for an adventure to Knowhere?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki's path continues to twist in unexpected ways, this time into new dimensions, as he and the Guardians head to Knowhere in search of the reality stone--and, it seems, a reality at all capable of handling Loki himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Either Loki's starting to crack, or I am. Time will tell which of us it is, I guess.
> 
> Also: hail hydra. I mean doomfrost.

“Adventure,” as it turns out, might not have been the best choice of phrasing. 

The Benatar, Loki has learned, cuts swiftly through space, its movements graceful and exacting. Like a dancer. Like _him_ when he’s in his element. It’s a well-built ship, and one he thinks he should like to have when this is all said and done. He’ll strand these Guardians, as they call themselves, on some planet or other (and he might even do them the courtesy of ensuring it’s a _hospitable_ planet first) and then take off. He’ll make his home elsewhere. 

 _No barren moon._  

He just has some business to attend to first. 

Loki sits quietly, unmoving, in his seat, as outwardly calm as one can possibly appear while knowingly and _voluntarily_ traveling toward what might be imminent death. Gamora won’t stop staring at him while sharpening her sword, and every now and then Loki smiles at her, cruel and cold; the first time he does it, she cuts her finger on the edge of the blade and doesn’t even flinch. 

He thinks he could like her under different circumstances that _didn’t_ leave him wanting to snap her neck and chuck her into space to drift for eternity like the rest of his people. _His_ people. How times have changed, he thinks, that he’s come to once again accept Asgard as his home and its people as his own, even if they had never accepted him—and even if they and the planet have ceased to exist. 

The green man, Drax, eyes them both periodically before going back to tracking the screen in front of him. Quill stands beside him at the viewport, one hand braced against the top beam of the ship as he leans forward to observe their surroundings. 

The bug woman is the only other person aboard this vessel whose name Loki has not yet managed to learn, and she is also the most difficult for him to pin down. The others are angry, violent, and moronic, in that order, but the small woman with the antenna—she’s proving more difficult to suss out. She clearly has mental abilities of a sort, perhaps something like this own, so he keeps his distance from her; he will trade fists and swords and sarcastic barbs with anyone at any time of day, but those who can peel away his defenses to simply take what they want from his mind was worth keeping at a distance. 

Loki doesn’t particularly care about her, though, no more than he’s forced to care about anyone on this ship as it sends them hurtling through space toward almost certain doom. This is a fool’s errand. If Thanos is on Knowhere already, then they have lost before they’ve even arrived. If they get there first and miraculously depart with the stone, it only be a matter of time before Thanos finds them, especially given he now has three of the other stones calling to their missing brethren. The pace will accelerate now with every additional stone, and with the space stone’s ability to transport its wielder across unfathomable distances with but a thought . . . 

If Thanos arrives at the same time they do, they are finished. With three infinity stones augmenting his already overwhelming strength, most importantly the power stone, there is likely nothing any of them could do to stop him. 

Their only option, then, and their only hope, is to arrive first, find the stone, and destroy it. They must break its shell and scatter its atoms to the winds to return to the primordial cosmic dust from which it formed. Doing so will take incredible power and will, and Loki has known since the realization first dawned in his mind who will have to carry out the task. 

He hadn’t told Thor, of course; the oaf would have found a way to haul him aboard the pod one way or another. To destroy an infinity stone is to destroy a part of one’s own existence. He read oblique references to the mysterious stones in his youthful studies in Asgard’s and Vanaheim’s archives, along with the apocryphal tales of what terrible fates had befallen all who had attempted to harness their power—or destroy them. The end result was always the same. Even individually, they were too much for anything with a finite lifespan to understand and control; together, they would destroy anything which hoped to wield them as one. 

Loki had, during a moment of clarity in New York, tried to sever the connection between himself and the Other (and, by extension, Thanos himself). He had tried with all he had to break the mind stone from the scepter and then grind the stone to dust; he’d barely even broken through the first outer layer with his magic before he felt his thoughts blurring as though his brain were about to burst into flames. 

The Other had then immediately summoned him, or at least his astral self, back to Sanctuary for . . . _reconditioning._  

When Loki had woken up minutes later, sweat drying on clammy skin and the scepter burning in his hand until his skin blistered, he understood the futility of it all. The stones were eternal; _he_ was not, and so even attempting to destroy one would likely take his life.

So what, then, does he hope to accomplish by destroying the reality stone? Will all reality cease to be at that point, he wonders? Or only his? He will most definitely die in the process. He knows this already. But will it be in this reality or another? And most importantly, will it be _enough_? 

He watches through the window as the ship flies through what he can only liken to an eye socket in a skull, slowing to a drift as the crew attempts to find a suitable landing spot. 

“This place looks deserted.” 

“I’m reading movement from the third quadrant.” 

Loki’s stomach clenches; they’re too late. They’re too late, and Thanos is going to tear them apart, possibly literally, before going on to collect the final two stones after he leaves this planet with the reality stone firmly in his control. 

He closes his eyes and waits for the ship to touch down, and he pretends not to notice that his hands are shaking as he unbuckles from his seat and stands. The ache is still there in his legs, but he ignores it and debarks with everyone else. 

“All right, you fancy-ass goat,” Quill starts with a nod at Loki’s helmet. “You’re up front with me.” 

“What?” Gamora stalks forward, sword still in hand. “Peter—” 

“We’ve got a _wizard_ here,” Quill hisses back, despite the fact Loki can hear him perfectly well at his side. “Put the firepower up front. And the cannon fodder.” 

“I can hear you, you know.” 

“Good. Then you’ll know that if you try to screw us over, all of us will be right there to see it and stop you.” Quill slapped his back, earning an infuriated look for his trouble. “Lead the way. We’ve got your back.” 

Loki chooses not to comment and instead only moves the human up to second place on his immediate kill list after Gamora. But it also isn’t a terrible idea; he _is_ the most powerful weapon they have right now, so it makes sense that he would either lead the way or bring up the rear. And given that he can’t blame them for not trusting him enough to put him at their backs, he knows his place here at the forefront: the first to stare death in the eye and laugh. 

They course through the meandering paths inside the building, footsteps echoing among the clutter. Sif had reported back to Loki—well, to Odin, she thought—about hers and Volstagg’s journey to the Collector’s sanctum. She had told Loki of the eerie structure itself and the assortment of oddities and treasures housed within it. Even her breathless recollection could not have prepared Loki for just how truly unsettling the entire place is, however. It crawls along his skin and itches in his throat, like his sorcery has been poisoned and turned sour in his veins. Something is _wrong_ , and it isn’t entirely the location itself. 

Loki can see fires burning and smell smoke and spilled oil, but the Guardians pass through as though they sense none of it. Loki blinks, and then the fires are gone; he blinks again and they begin to materialize again like red-orange mirages. 

They pass by one of the Collector’s boxes, the mirror inside it cracked and splintering the glass but still reflecting an image back at Loki that makes him stop in his tracks. He sees himself wielding the gauntlet, every stone in place, and yet . . . and yet it is _not_ him. It _is_ , though; he knows this instinctively, and he recognizes the sharp features, the dark hair, the horned helmet. But those eyes. He does _not_ recognize them, full of fire and madness as they are. He doesn’t recognize the rictus grin splitting his doppelganger’s face into a mockery of glee. This face is older, more weathered, more . . . _unhinged_. 

The gauntlet is firmly in place on his arm, the stones arcing energy in every direction, and he, the god of chaos, caught in the midst of it all, laughing even as the power consumes him. 

He reaches out to touch the image, feels fire against his fingertips, and _pushes_. 

The image blinks out of existence, leaving only his own startled face— _his_ face—staring back at him through the cracked glass. 

“Cut it out. You can get handsy later,” Quill snaps, nodding his head toward the clearing through which Loki can just make out the Collector’s legs. As they draw nearer, a hauntingly familiar voice reaches his ears, making his breath quicken and his already injured legs tremble. 

He freezes despite himself, unable to take one step further. The darkness, the smoke, Thanos himself—he’s back on Sanctuary again, crawling away from the Chitauri to hide behind a rock and just try to die in piece before he’s resurrected again for more experiments. He’s trapped on the Statesman again, unable to stop the slaughter as Thanos and his children run roughshod over the Asgardian refugees. He’s held in the Mad Titan’s grip again, losing consciousness as the air is choked from him. 

He’s very distantly aware of Quill hissing in his ear for him to keep going and then Gamora ordering them all to leave him there. It’s only when he hears the woman’s screaming sobs a minute or two later that he snaps back into focus, and this time the fires remain. The Collector and his case are missing. The place is in utter ruin, despite everyone else’s failure to see the same. 

“No!” Loki cries out, launching forward despite Quill’s efforts to restrain him. “This isn’t real! This isn’t—” 

He’s stopped short by the Titan, seemingly bleeding to death on the ground, turning to look at him and aiming the gauntlet directly at him. 

“You are proving yourself to be quite the nuisance, little godling.” 

Loki’s vision glows red for just an instant. When it clears, the Guardians are gone, as is Thanos. As is the Collector. He frowns and walks forward, fully expecting an attack, but he finds nothing but scattered boxes from the Collector’s prizes and the vast emptiness of the ruined storehouse. 

He keeps walking, the sick-feeling magic still thick in his blood and the hairs on the back of his neck starting to stand on end. Rounding a corner, he walks into what appears to be a vast cavern. A boy in black and green and yellow garb kneels before a burning pyre of a sort, atop which rests a version of Loki’s helm he doesn’t recall seeing before. The boy is staring at something in the misty fire, something Loki can’t quite identify, and clutching a black bird in his hands. 

Then, without warning, the boy lurches forward and sinks his teeth into the bird, which produces a startled squawk and flaps its wings several times until its merciful death. The boy, tears streaming down his cheeks, blood thick in his mouth, looks up again at the mist. 

“I win.” 

He falls forward onto his hands and knees, fists pounding at the ground as the magical fire dies, the crackling noises giving way until only the sound of the boy’s sobs fill the chamber. 

Loki watches, transfixed, horrified, as the boy crawls toward the pyre, drags the horned helm down, and clutches it to his chest, shuddering as he sinks back against the stone. 

“Damn you,” he rasps out in a voice not entirely befitting one of his age. This voice is older, harsher, and Loki gasps when the boy looks up, directly at him now and yet not fully seeing him. It is him. He knows it, just as he knows now the reflection in the broken mirror was him. The colors, the small horns on the boy’s cowl, the striking eyes—all him, but _not_. 

“Damn you all.” 

The flames burn out, plunging the room into total darkness and silence but for the boy’s quieting whimpering until that, too, is lost. 

That. That never happened. Loki is certain of it. He would _remember_ that. He has never worn that garb, nor that helm. He has never—he hasn’t— 

He continues on, following a _tink, tink, tink_ noise that draws him farther into the chamber. He expects to hear the boy crying, but instead, he passes straight through where the boy and pyre were without hitting either of them. The pinprick of light he’s focused on following grows into a candle flame in its holder on a table, casting flickering shadows against a far wall. The table itself is simple wood, with a variety of dishes scattered atop it. Two figures sit at either end of it—one seems to be a man clad in a full suit of metal armor, complete with a mask obscuring his face. Across from him sits a woman who reminds Loki of the Lady Sif for reasons he can’t quite place, and yet who he knows, again, _inexplicably_ , is _him_. 

The clicking and scraping of silverware across the plates stops, and Loki freezes, certain the woman who is him and yet _not_ looks directly at him, sensing him somehow, before smirking and walking across the table to the metal-clad man. She is languid seduction, every movement perfectly calculated to be as tempting and graceful as possible, right up until she pushes the table away far enough to straddle the metal man’s lap, her hips rolling as if to tease out a reaction. 

“We have company, Victor,” she coos, her hand disappearing between their bodies for a moment and out of Loki’s line of sight. She readjusts herself, then sinks back down with a shuddering sigh. “Let’s not disappoint them.” 

The metal man flicks one steel-plated hand at the table. The candlelight extinguishes seemingly under its own power, but Loki knows magic when he sees it, when he _feels_ it. He shivers at the sound of the woman’s— _his_ —laughter, cold and caustic, echoing through the brick room; he feels a bit nauseated when the laughter turns into a breathy moan before fading into silence. 

A dripping noise draws his focus to the right, and he follows the noise until another point of light opens up to reveal itself as a shaft of moonlight cascading in through a cave opening. Ragged stalagmites rise from the ground, and Loki steps around them carefully, silently, until he can see into a clearing in the massive cave. 

That is him. He knows that too, just as he knows the insane monster looking at him through the cracks in the mirror, the desperate boy, the cold woman, all of them were and are _him_. Fragments of him, perhaps, pieces of himself that could have been but never were, but no less real for the possibility. 

That is _him_ stretched out upon a stone slab, stripped and bound in iron chains, shockingly red hair spilling out across the rock. This one is taller, more wiry, but unmistakably still somehow him. 

The woman next to him is unrecognizable to Loki, shrouded as she is in the darkness and the additional shadows of a long brown cloak. Her arms are all that are visible beyond the cloak, and even they look painfully thin and wasted, as though she hasn’t eaten in an age. Her wrists barely look strong enough to support the bowl she holds over the doppelganger’s face. 

The bowl . . . 

Loki looks up, eyes widening upon finally noticing the large serpent draped over a system of branches sweeping along the roof the cave. Its mouth hangs open, venom dripping from its fangs into the bowl. And it is only then Loki notices the scarred flesh on the woman’s hands and on the copy’s face. The eyes are the worst, having been ruined by the venom and the scar tissue that doesn’t appear to have ever been given the chance to set completely. 

The double turns his head and looks directly at Loki, blind or not, and offers a disturbingly cheerful smile. 

“Sigyn, look! We have a visitor!” 

Loki startles. “Sigyn?” he whispers, heart racing. No, no, not _his_ Sigyn. Not the Vanir girl he met in his youth while studying, the girl with the curly auburn hair and bright blue eyes, the one he had pined for and chased in adolescent stupidity until he’d won her over and charmed his way into first her bed and then her heart. Not the one he had talked into returning to Asgard with him to marry, only to then promptly forget about once the novelty of a new romance had worn off. 

 _This_ Sigyn is . . . gods. She looks at him, those same piercing blue eyes visible even in the deep shadows of her hooded cloak, and Loki’s heart goes from a gallop to a complete stop. 

Sharp, choking laughter echoes through the cave, dragging Loki’s attention back to . . . well, himself. 

“You’re so young. You’re just a child still. Oh, I’m very sorry you’ve already found yourself here. This is no place for a proper meeting. Come and sit with us. Talk. We aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.” 

“Who—” 

“If you’re going to ask stupid questions you already know the answers to, don’t bother talking at all,” the other snaps, but the flash of anger is gone as quickly as it appears. “If you’d like to _learn_ , though . . .” 

“I don’t—” Loki hesitates, glancing around the cave again before settling his gaze on the _other_ Loki. “I don’t understand.” 

The other Loki laughs, a shrill noise that makes Loki’s skin crawl. 

“Yes, you do. You just don’t _want_ to understand. You don’t want to trust your own eyes—which is probably for the best. You’re not really here. Well, you are and you aren’t. But trust your instincts, boy. None of this is real. Not for you.” 

“But for you?” Loki ventures, taking a cautious step forward. 

“Oh, it’s very real for me. Sigyn? The bowl?” 

The woman nods solemnly and removes the bowl, walking a few feet away to kneel at a well-worn trough against the cave wall to very deliberately pour out the collected venom. The snake hisses, and Loki watches his double brace and then contort wildly against the chains as the first droplet touches his forehead. His writhing shakes the ground under Loki’s feet, knocking him off-balance so that he has to lurch forward to clutch onto one of the stalagmites to remain standing. 

He doesn’t scream, though. He clenches his jaw so tightly Loki can see veins bulging, and the low groaning is impossible to miss. But he doesn’t scream. 

“Sigyn! Damn you, woman, would you have me suffer longer? Hurry!” 

The woman still says nothing, only walks back to him, resigned to her fate, and stretches her too-thin arms out once more, head down. 

That is _not_ Loki’s Sigyn. 

“Thank you,” the other murmurs, keening and pressing into her touch when she lowers a hand to pull a few long strands from his face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, darling. I don’t mean to—you know how it hurts.” 

She says nothing. Again. Loki is left to wonder about _this_ version of the carefree, nature-loving girl he’d fallen in love with so long ago before so carelessly discarding her once he got bored. She had torn into him then, and he has no doubt that in this scenario, were their positions similar, she would have dumped the bowl and its contents on his head and abandoned him there to his own misery. 

This Sigyn, though . . . 

“I’ve lost my way,” he mutters, more to himself than anything, and the doppelganger turns those not-quite-seeing eyes toward him again. When he smiles, Loki sees dark scars standing out on his lips, vivid against the paleness of his skin.

“You’re just finding your way. Haven’t you walked the skies and seen other worlds as I have? What a sad Loki you are. You don’t deserve to share my name.” 

“I’ve seen—” Loki stops himself, frowning at the sudden twinge of pain in his leg. He reaches down to rub at his thigh to help ease the ache. “I’ve seen enough.” 

“No. No, Odinson. You haven’t.” The double coughs out a noise almost like a laugh. “ _Odinson_. What a turn. What a cruel turn the fates have made for you. To be betrayed by my friend, by my blood brother, that’s one thing. But the one who raised me? That’s just mean.” He pauses, lips curling into a smile that is by no means kind. “Not to mention, it would present some _very_ interesting problems, given mine and Odin’s _and_ Thor’s . . . encounters from time to time. I don’t suppose you’ve ever taken either of them as a lover, have you?” 

Loki’s face screws up into such an apparent mask of disgust that the other laughs—genuinely, loudly, until his entire body shakes upon the slab. 

“Oh, don’t answer. I should have known. It’s too bad. Odin can change himself as I can—you can do that as well, can’t you? It creates some wonderful possibilities. And Thor . . . poor, blessedly dumb Thor. He doesn’t need to shift. He’s really quite outstanding as he is. No disrespect to you, darling,” he adds, glance flicking up to Sigyn, who remains just as impassive and unreadable. 

Loki shakes his head to clear it and, he hopes, rid himself of the terrible mental images beginning to form. “How do you know who I am? Or anything about me?” 

The other fixes Loki with a disbelieving look then. “Because you’re me, stupid. And I’m you. Separated by worlds and universes, maybe. But we’re still the same. I don’t envy you your fate, little shadow god,” the double continues, flexing his wrists against the restraints in a way that betrays he’s done it thousands upon thousands of times before, all to the same ends. “Mine will end. It already has. It will again. It’s ending now. I’ll see my children slaughter those who have and who would try to slaughter them. I’ll die. I haven’t been born yet. All will burn. All _has_ burned, as it will burn again. It’s burning now. It never stops. But I, as I am now, will end. One day. You . . .” 

He licks his lips and turns haunted eyes and a haunting grin up at Loki. 

“Your fate is in ruins. Your _world_ is in ruins. The tapestry is broken, and you’re the one left holding the threads. _That_ is a fate I would never want for myself, tricksters being what they are and all. We’re only good at destroying and the initial creation. Not maintenance.” 

Loki’s hands curl into fists at his side, magic swelling and burning his blood before it begins sparking at his hands, but the other simply laughs at him, callous and sharp. 

“Oh, put that away, boy. I’ve swallowed souls and birthed monsters. Your sparkles don’t scare me. Though I do see . . .” The double looks at Loki, truly looks at him, _through_ him, hard enough to make Loki steel himself as though preparing for a physical attack. “I do see the norns’ work on you. And Yggdrasil’s. Most impressive. Your world must be worse than I imagined.” 

The roof of the cave shudders, and Loki looks up to watch the dust filter down to the ground. The double watches as well and grins. 

“Ah. I think our time is coming to an end, Sigyn, darling. And you, little shadow god. You’ve seen Ragnarok already. You won’t want to stay around for this one.” 

“I don’t understand—” 

“You will. You _do_. You just won’t open your eyes.” 

“But I—” 

 _“I don’t get it. His eyes are open, but no one’s home.”_

_“Maybe he’s dead.”_

_“He’s still **breathing** , Drax.”_ 

“Go,” the double says, snapping one wrist free from his binding and then the other. “Your world needs you. Mine . . . well. It will always need me. And it will never have me, just as it has never been free of me.” 

Loki stumbles back, knocked from his feet by another hard tremble of the ground. 

 _“He’s feeling great confusion. His mind is . . . it’s jumbled, like there’s more than one person in there.”_

_“Great. **Great**. So some WWF-looking wannabe took off with our ship and two members of our crew **and** left us with his axe-crazy brother. This is the day that keeps getting better.”_ 

“Wait!” Loki cries, desperation edging into his tone. His would-be self stops to regard him coolly before walking over to kneel besides him, one hand reaching out to tap his forehead with an index finger. 

“No more waiting, Loki. No more games. No more chances. Go. Be brave.” 

 _“Wake.”_  

Loki draws in a heaving gasp of air, pulling back into the present like an elastic band snapping into place. His first instinct, as usual, is to reach for his magic, his daggers, or in this case, both, resulting in him conjuring a dagger in one hand and a mystic flame in the other. His lips carve back into a snarl as he readies himself for a fight, but the two men before him are ready. Drax pulls a sword, and Quill already has a blaster aimed directly at his face. 

“Don’t. Even. Think about it. I am _really_ not in the mood for anyone else’s crap right now, least of all yours.” 

A quick (albeit half-panicked) look around confirms he is back—or still—in the Collector’s storehouse. The fires he thought he had only been imagining earlier are there but very much present now, the smell of burning wood and copper thick in the air, along with the smoke resulting from the fires themselves. 

“Where is he? Where is Thanos?” 

“Gone,” Quill spits, and Loki notices he isn’t lowering the blaster. “And he took Gamora. No thanks to you.” 

“Me?” 

“You just—you just _stood_ there!” the man explains, his anger and hurt coming out plainly in both his words and his tone of voice. Loki, undeterred, simply lifts his chin, his old regal imperiousness returning. 

“I was rather indisposed—” 

“Yeah, no shit. Thanks for the assist. Come on. We need to get back to the ship and figure out where the hell he’s going next and how to get Gamora back. Or you can stay here and rot. I don’t care. Drax, Mantis, let’s go.” 

Loki lags behind, still frozen where he stands. It is, he notices, precisely where he was standing when Thanos looked at him, just before that flash of red took everything Loki knew and twisted it inside out within his mind. 

When he finally begins to walk again, legs heavy, he imagines the roof of the storehouse shaking. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howls and a great horn blows, and Loki gasps when he feels a blade drive its way through his chest in nearly the exact position of Heimdall’s fatal wound. He looks down, expecting to see blood seeping through his clothing; he sees only his golden armor, unblemished, and echoes of wicked laughter ring in his ears. 

“Damn you all,” he whispers in a voice which is both his and _not_ , as weary legs carry him back aboard the ship.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Loki travels with the rest of the Guardians to Titan in their hunt for Thanos, his body finally heals, but his mind continues to fracture, showing him glimpses of lives that are, that have been, that could be, that might yet come to pass. 
> 
> The only common thread between them so far is that they involve sacrifice. 
> 
> If the norns are attempting to send him a message, he thinks they may have him confused with someone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While we're mixing realities here, why not throw in some more absurdities? This may also be a blatant excuse to work in Best Loki, aka Siege Loki. Fight me.

Loki has decided that he’s going to snap the bug woman’s neck if she doesn’t stop staring at him. 

She sits across from him on the ship, hands folded neatly in her lap, antennae twitching just enough to make it clear she’s thinking about something—all while those impossibly large eyes are fixed directly on him. He takes it for as long as he can, even giving her the courtesy of pretending not to notice, before he finally snaps. 

“What?” 

“What?” she repeats, blinking. 

“What do you want, you vile little insect? Why do you stare at me so?” 

“Oh. I didn’t realize I was.” She trails off and looks down at her hands for a moment before looking back up at him. “Your thoughts are . . . are very strange.” 

It’s Loki’s turn to blink in surprise at her. “You have antennae. You look like an insect disguised as a woman. Don’t presume to lecture me about _strangeness._ ” 

If the words wound at all, the woman shows absolutely no sign of it. 

“You aren’t alone in your mind. But you are.” 

“How insightful,” Loki grouses, voice dry as the desert. “Now that that’s established, let’s go back to ignoring each other, hmm?” 

The woman’s head tilts to one side, just slightly, looking like nothing so much as a dog cocking its head in response to a curiosity-provoking noise nearby. 

“You left us.” 

“I’ve no patience for this.” 

“Your body stayed,” the bug-woman continues as if Loki hadn’t spoken at all, “but your mind left us. Are you a thought traveler?” 

Loki rolls his eyes for what must be the hundredth time of late. “A what?” 

“A thought traveler. One who can move their mind from place to place.” 

A brief snarl flashes across Loki’s face before it gives way to a shockingly sweet smile. “No, but I _am_ an organ displacer. Shall I demonstrate for you?” 

The woman grins and sits up straighter. “Oh, yes! That sounds fun!” 

“Excellent. I think it does as well.” Loki drops a dagger from his sleeve. “I’ll make it quick.” 

“Uh, no. If there’s going to be any murder on this ship, it’ll be me taking a hammer to your skull,” Quill notes, stepping away from the viewport and between Loki and the insectoid woman. Loki glances up at him, shrugs, and fits the dagger back into its holster strapped to his arm. 

“She said it sounded fun.” 

Quill gives him an exasperated look before looking over at the woman. “Mantis, look. I never thought I’d say this, but I think we’ve found someone who can out-crazy you. Just . . . don’t engage, okay?” 

Mantis, then. Appropriate name, Loki supposes. When she looks at him, face screwing up into an expression he thinks is supposed to mimic anger, he simply turns that same sweet smile on her and settles back into his seat, hands folded primly in his lap. 

It will take some time before they arrive on Titan to begin the next futile leg of this journey—one he protested vehemently, incidentally. He can think of no reason why Thanos would return to his home world before gathering all of the stones, so they need to head to another location, perhaps even Midgard, where one of the remaining gems may be found. But no. Quill, in his infinite stupidity, has decided on a vengeance-driven search-and-rescue mission instead that is likely to get them all killed, and so their course is set for Titan. 

Loki can hardly wait. 

He only means to close his eyes for a moment. He can feel his seiðr finally returning to its full strength (or whatever “full” means at this point, as he stills feels Yggdrasil’s branches encasing him and the norns’ whispers in his thoughts), but he is still weary, still sore from the injuries sustained aboard the Statesman (and the fight on Asgard before that, and _how_ , he wonders, has that only been a matter of days at this point and not years?). Along with his grasp on reality, perhaps he is beginning to lose all concept of time as well. 

He closes his eyes and drifts, detaching his mind from body and letting each heal separately. 

He does _not_ mean to dream. 

He _thinks_ he’s dreaming. 

For a time, there is only the darkness behind his eyelids and the rustling of movement around him as Quill paces the length of the ship, muttering to himself the entire time about his plans to murder Thanos, plans which will never even come close to succeeding. 

Beyond the darkness, though, and beyond the expected noises of the other beings on this ship, Loki hears . . . crying? 

He follows the noise, the darkness gradually fading into the brilliant light of a hall much like Gladsheim. His heart aches for the home that isn’t. This version is much more rustic, made almost entirely of wood and stone. It lacks the golden pomp of the great palace Loki recalls, but it’s near enough to blur his vision until he blinks the tears away. 

Loki steps into the hall, not entirely surprised to see his red-haired double there again, the strangest of the three he had encountered already. If the man notices him this time, he does not acknowledge him. Rather, he crouches on the ground, holding a small young girl by the arms. She’s quite lovely, Loki thinks, with long, raven-black hair and skin the shade of moonlight. She could be his, he thinks, and the thought makes him smile just a little. 

“Shh. You’ll be fine, darling. You’ll be—” 

“I don’t want to go!” she cries, face crumpling as her tears overtake her again. “Don’t let him take me! Papa, please!” 

Loki circles around one of the hall’s columns supporting the roof, steps falling as softly as snow, and he stops short when he gets a good look at the girl’s _other_ side. The normal-looking child’s face with its baby fat and pink cheeks is gone, replaced by a skeletal head. Her arm is that of a skeleton’s as well, not a trace of muscle or skin to be seen anywhere. The hair on that side is scraggly and patchy, falling in a limp clump that looks as though it would come away in someone’s hand if they were to just touch it. 

The double still does not look at him, instead reserving his attention only for what was evidently his daughter. 

“My darling girl. This is your fate. This was always your fate, even before you were born. Odin is . . . he’s only seeing that it’s fulfilled. He isn’t _making_ it.” 

The girl lets out a cry that rends Loki’s heart as though this truly was _his_ child pleading with him, and he feels his throat close around a whimper as she throws herself into his double’s arms, her small body trembling with the force of her sobbing. The not-Loki (or perhaps _he_ is the true one and Loki himself is the imposter; his mother _had_ always told him not to lose himself in his illusions, hadn’t she?) folds his arms around the girl, so long they nearly circle back around her thin frame, and smooths her hair back over her shoulders before cupping a hand to the back of her head. 

“Shh. Please don’t cry. Don’t let them see you cry.” 

“Will you—will you come with me?” 

The double smiles sadly, visible only to Loki himself and not the girl he’s struggling to comfort. “I will walk with you as far as I can. But I can’t enter Hel. Not yet. That is _yours_ , my love. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But your path is not mine.” 

The girl hides her face against the double’s neck, tiny fingers burying themselves in that long red hair cascading down his back. 

“Will I see you again, Papa?” 

The double looks up, locks eyes with Loki—they are not scarred, and they are very clearly _seeing_ —and Loki knows he’s lying. 

“Yes.” 

He presses a kiss to the child’s head. 

“Yes, Hel. Soon.” 

Hel . . . Hela? 

No. This is— 

Loki feels sick, as he had when he’d spun in circles as a child until he’d fallen to the ground, breathless and dizzy and laughing for the freedom of it all. 

But there is no freedom in this. 

What was it he had told the Midgardians what seems to have been an eternity ago? Something about freedom being life’s great lie? It was so very long ago now (it was yesterday, he thinks, and it hasn’t happened yet) . . . 

His double lifts the child into his arms and carries her toward the opposite end of the hall, and Loki hurries to follow, keeping to the shadows in case he is not as protected from prying eyes as he thinks. The immense wooden doors open, spilling blinding light into the hall so that Loki has to throw a hand up over his eyes to shield them. 

When he lowers it and blinks away the spots momentarily seared into his retinas, he finds the scene has transformed again. His double and the girl are gone. Gladsheim has disappeared from around him and replaced itself with a razed and scorched landscape, the evidence of a terrible battle that appears to have taken nearly everything and everyone with it. 

The Avengers—some Loki recognizes, some he doesn’t—are in disarray, defeated, dying, while a hulking, amorphous monster rages out of control, shaking off every direct hit as though nothing can faze it. 

And there, crouched just yards away, is yet another Loki. He’s larger than Loki himself is, and his garb is unlike anything Loki has worn, but like all the others, Loki _knows_ who it is. He looks older, harsher, and he holds his hands out like claws before him, speaking words Loki can’t hear from this distance. 

The beast continues to rage. More heroes fall. 

“—them fight. Let them save us,” he hears as he draws nearer, and if there is anything to follow, it is lost in the sudden rumble of thunder and ear-splitting crack of lightning arcing down onto the field. Loki looks up as if he even needs to see who could cause such a commotion. There has only ever been one person in his life—and only one in any _version_ of his life, it seems. 

Whatever Thor says is muffled by the fearsome power sparking around him, and Loki gawks at it. He hasn’t often seen Thor _truly_ let loose with his abilities, as doing so tends to lead to collateral damage that even Thor is smart enough to try to avoid when possible. Perhaps, he thinks, this is how Thor felt aboard the Statesman when he saw energy rippling through Loki, arcing under his skin and coursing outward to destroy anything its path, yet still so tightly controlled as to be beyond belief. 

And yet somehow, even for all the energy Thor is emitting that even Loki, someone who is not actually _there_ , can feel thick in his blood, even _that_ is not enough to stop this creature. 

It wheels around to face the double, who only looks up at it, extending the stones, and screams, “You will pay for what you’ve done here, monster!” 

“Magic rocks? No. We won’t be having any of that.” 

Loki watches with frozen horror as the creature uses its . . . claws? Hands? Tendrils? It lifts the doppelganger into the air, and Loki feels the intense pressure building as though _he_ were the one held in the monster’s grasp. And it _is_ him in a way, isn’t it? 

The double screams as its pierced by the being’s energy, looking up at Thor, who is watching in just as much transfixed terror as Loki himself is.

“I’m sorry, brother.” 

Loki has lived this life. He knows it. He has lived it and every variation of it, and he knows exactly how being torn apart by the creature’s energy feels just a moment before it happens. Knowing, however, does not stop him from falling to his knees and doubling over, arms around his torso, fingers curled like talons into his ribs as though he can hold them together through sheer force. It isn’t _him_ being ripped to shreds, but it _is_ , after all. The strange redhead had been right; they are all connected, all shades of the same. 

It always comes down to Thor, doesn’t it? In every life, in every realm, in every possible iteration, his entire existence always comes down to Thor—and, it seems, to sacrificing himself for the same. 

When the dazzling light fades, Loki dares look up and finds himself back in his own body, in his own mind (he thinks), aboard the Benatar with two sets of eyes watching him. One set is curious and even concerned; the other is wary and distant. 

“I told you there was more than one person in there,” Mantis “whispers,” not doing much to conceal her voice when Loki sits directly across from her. Drax nods slowly but remains quiet. 

And Loki . . . 

He looks down, alarmed to find he’s clutching hard enough at the armrests of his chair to have gouged them almost completely through with just his fingertips. The dark veins he had first spotted after calling so much power to him aboard the Statesman have returned, only now they creep up the backs of his hands along his wrists, disappearing under the sleeve of his armor. 

“You’re bleeding,” Drax notes matter-of-factly, touching his nose to indicate where. Loki slowly peels his hand away from the armrest and runs a finger under his nose; it comes back red and slick. “Everywhere.”  
  
Loki grabs a nearby silver canister and peers into it, eyebrows lifting as he sees blood not only trickling from his nose, but from both eyes and ears, turning his face into a crimson mask. 

“Oh, are you dying?” Quill asks as he passes by, barely even pausing as he regards Loki like something especially unpleasant on the bottom of his shoe. “Bummer. All right, people, it’s go time.” 

Drax falls into step behind Quill immediately, and Mantis gets to her feet but at least has the courtesy to drop a threadbare cloth into Loki’s lap before she goes. Even that simple gesture is enough to make Loki reorganize his priorities, and he decides to move her to the bottom of the list of Guardians he intends to murder before all is said and done. 

Once he’s wiped his face and is fairly certain he’s no longer actively dripping, he brings up the rear of the unlikely train of misfits moving single-file out of the ship. Quill stops them as soon as they’re out, directing them to take cover behind the Benatar’s left flank. 

“That,” he points out quietly, aiming his blaster at where one of Thanos’s ships appears to have crash-landed just moments earlier, judging by the smoke and whirring noises, “is where we’re going. Take no prisoners. Except Thanos. We still need him. Don’t kill him.” 

Loki scoffs, something almost like genuine laughter burbling out of him. “You could not even _harm_ him if you wanted to, you worm.” 

The blaster gets turned back around on Loki then. “Don’t think I won’t trade you for Gamora in a heartbeat.” 

“I hadn’t thought that, no, but you’ll be disappointed anyway. I’m sure he would rather have his _daughter_ than me,” Loki points out, practically spitting out the word. It’s venomous, and it seems to at least graze its mark, even if it doesn’t score a direct hit. Quill scowls and then disappears behind the mask sliding into place as the helmet materializes. 

“Screw you. And listen up, gang. Here’s the plan.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of the billions of humans crowding Earth, somehow fate has seen fit to pluck the two from it Loki least wants to see again and drop them onto a remote planet with him. 
> 
> Or, how Loki, Doctor Strange, and Tony Stark form a black hole of snark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 20k+ words and this potentially frostiron-y fic finally drags Tony into the mess. Champagne for everyone!

The plan is stupid. 

The plan is _stupid_ , and it’s going to get them killed, just as Loki had suspected it would, and he points this out immediately as soon as Quill finally shuts his ever-running mouth. The man stops and stares at him (Loki assumes, anyway; it’s impossible to tell behind the goggles obscuring his eyes) for a long while until Loki deigns to explain himself. 

“He is all but immune to whatever physical damage you can hope to inflict at this point. Even if he did not already possess the power stone, he still has all the others. The reality stone alone will unmake you, paralyze you until he simply grinds you into dust,” Loki notes, ignoring the way Mantis makes a face like a child hearing an especially gruesome ghost tale by a campfire. 

“Then what do you suggest, exactly? Just let him go? Ask him very politely to turn over the rocks?” 

Loki shakes his head, a slow grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “What do I suggest? Mischief.”  
  
Quill’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. “Yeah, that’s real cute. How about a real plan?” 

“Magic. He has no defenses against it. None natural. None that the stones can provide—” 

“Except the reality stone. The one you _just_ said is the one we’ve gotta look out for.” 

“Well, yes,” Loki concedes, impatience creeping into his voice. “The point is to wear him down before he can think to use it.” 

“So what you’re saying is you want us to trust _you_ to not screw us over.” 

“Yes,” Loki agrees with a smile, though his eyes slide over to Mantis. “And her.” 

“Me?” 

Loki nods. “I will cloak us with our magic, conceal our presence from him. You will sedate him as best you can. Perhaps it will give us the chance we need to remove the gauntlet.” 

“Perhaps?” Quill all but squeaks, and Loki has no doubt the man’s eyes are huge behind the mask. “That’s the best you got? _Perhaps_?” 

“That is _all_ I have,” Loki corrects, rising to his feet and adjusting his helmet before triggering the release mechanisms on the daggers strapped to his arms. They slide down easily into his palms, and he immediately imbues them with his sorcery, enchanting them so that they will return to him with only a thought. He keeps pulling at his magic, calling it forth until it settles like gossamer over the four of them, just heavy enough to register its presence. 

“I can still see you.” Drax stares directly at Loki, and it’s all Loki can do not to push one of the daggers in his hands into the dullard’s eye. 

“Of course you can. I’ve only hidden us from the outside.” 

“I think it’s a trap,” Drax goes on, looking over at Quill. “I think he’s done nothing and Thanos will see us when we board the ship.” 

“Yeah, probably,” Quill agrees, and Loki huffs. Fine. Let the lot of them doubt and die for it. He trusts his own abilities. 

“I believe you,” Mantis tells him, and he nods his thanks at her. She might make it off the kill list after all. 

They walk cautiously but purposefully toward the elliptical ship resting on its side, all of them glancing around for signs of an ambush—all, that is, except for Quill at the front, who is walking with a singular purpose. Loki might warn him against approaching the ship so aggressively, but with any luck, the idiotic human will get himself killed and free the rest of them from his foolishness. 

The large hole in the ship’s base torn open by the improper landing grants them easy access inside, and Loki is suitably (though still mildly) impressed by how silently they all move. Even the idiot. Drax moves nearly without noise at all, surprising for how large he is. Mantis looks as though she barely even weighs enough to make noise at all. And Loki—he learned centuries ago how to mask his footsteps not by magic, but simply through the art of sneaking through the palace long after the lights had dimmed for the night. 

They ascend through the multiple levels of the ship, finding nothing until voices begin drifting back to them, muffled and incomprehensible, once they near the top. Quill makes a gesture to encourage them all to the sides of the narrow passageway. For the sake of his own continued existence, should Thanos actually be aboard, Loki complies, flattening himself as best he can against the oddly shaped wall alongside Mantis. Quill and Drax mirror their movements across the aisle, with Quill communicating something Loki can’t quite hear and Drax nodding in approval. 

What he _can_ hear are voices on the far end of the ship, one of which in particular sounds familiar to Loki’s ears. He knows he’s heard it, but from this distance, when it still sounds underwater or like a voice half-remembered from a dream, he can’t be certain. 

And he won’t be certain if Quill gets his way. 

His eyes widen as Quill pulls what appears to be a grenade from within his coat and rolls it forward. It bounces a few times before hitting a steady rhythm, metal against metal until Loki hears the whine of an energy pulse and then the explosion a heartbeat later. 

“Go! Go! Go!” Quill spits out, rushing forward and leaving Loki to bring up the rear ( _again_ ). He chases after them, struggling to keep them cloaked as they spread out. Another grenade explodes, and with it goes Loki’s concentration—not from the blast, but from the sudden, squeezing _pressure_ in his head. 

_“I thought we had reached a truce, Asgardian.”_  

“Strange,” he all but hisses, and if he had any doubts about rushing into an unknown battle before, they dissipate in his anger. He forcefully ejects the Midgardian wizard from his mind, pulling back on the invisibility spell in order to fortify his own defenses. Let the Guardians fend for themselves; he has more urgent matters requiring his attention. 

He splits into two, then four, then eight, then dozens of clones, all rushing forward in perfect unison to, he hopes, overwhelm the sorcerer and whatever other unwelcome guests he may find. 

“Oh, God, not this asshole again,” he hears from _another_ familiar voice, and Loki thinks he might scream from how fate has apparently decided to throw _every_ human nuisance his way at once. 

He emerges amid a sea of clones, delighting in how the Avenger in the metal suit, even with a repulsor aimed directly at Drax’s head while the big man is on the ground, looks around at the clones surrounding him and lifts his arm, the second repulsor powering up with the high-pitched whine of electrical charge. 

“I’m gonna start shooting until I find the real one, so you might as well cut the shit, Loki,” he orders. 

All of the clones begin laughing at once, and when Loki speaks, his voice is amplified through all of them, so much so that Mantis cringes. 

“You can try, Stark. I can simply make more.” 

The sorcerer, though, is the one Loki focuses his attention on. He already knows from experience he can knock Stark off his guard; the wizard is the one who troubles Loki most. And beyond that, Loki has developed something of a personal grudge against him. 

Stark can wait. 

He knows the moment Strange has picked out exactly which of the “copies” is the real one, when those exacting eyes settle directly on him, and he vanishes from the spot just before a blast of energy shoots through what would have been his chest. 

“That’s rude,” he scolds, teleporting in behind the sorcerer and plunging the daggers in both hands into what _should_ be Strange’s back. He’s knocked off balance when he hits only empty air, and as he stumbles forward a half-step, he feels another blast of energy hit him square in his _own_ back, sending him sprawling forward onto the ground. 

“So was that,” Strange says dryly, approaching slowly with his defensive golden shield up and at the ready. “Stand down, Loki. We’ve been through this already.” 

Loki knows what Strange’s magic feels like now, knows the precise way it crawls over his skin, similar to his own but just different enough to feel _wrong_. He feels it now and notices the first glowing tendrils of a portal opening below him. Scrambling, he teleports again, this time insinuating himself between the sorcerer and his shield, so close he can see the minor color striations in Strange’s irises. 

“Doctor,” he greets with a wicked grin, planting both hands directly against Strange’s chest and channeling his seiðr through them, flowing as quickly as the lightning his brother yields at his command. The mortal’s eyes glow gold for a split second before he goes sailing backwards, landing awkwardly—and _hard_ —in a pile of scrap metal broken by the impact of the ship’s crash. 

“Last chance, Rudolph,” he hears behind him, and he can _taste_ the electricity in the air from the repulsor being so near. Loki barely twists his head to the side, just enough to see the Avenger from his peripheral vision. 

“This doesn’t concern you, Stark. Stay out of it.” 

“Nope. Sorry. Can’t. I’m really starting to hate _all_ you magical dickbags, but of the two of you, guess which one _hasn’t_ tried to kill me and take over my planet? So I gotta take his side on this one. Now back off.” 

Loki ignores him utterly and turns back around to find Strange has regained his footing. His clothing is still smoking, two faint palm outlines on his chest burned into his garb, and he sways unsteadily on his feet, clearly disoriented. To say he looks annoyed would be an understatement. 

“I’ll give you one more warning, Asgardian: _stand. down.”_  

“Chill the F out!” Loki hears behind him, and he rolls his eyes up toward the ceiling. Quill. Of _course_. He hears the mechanical whirring of the helmet as it retracts. “I’m gonna ask you this one time. Where’s Gamora?” 

“Yes, because _that’s_ what’s important here,” Loki and his clones grumble. Strange fixes him with an even more irritated glare, mutters something under his breath, and then waves the hand not aiming an especially vivid golden spiral of energy directly at Loki. The clones vanish, and Loki’s nose wrinkles at having his spell broken. “How droll.” 

“Our fight isn’t with you, Loki,” Strange warns, eyes narrowing. “Don’t _make_ it our fight.” 

“I think you’ll find I’ve undergone a bit of a change since we last met, Doctor.” His voice drops, ice threading through his words. “Do _not_ presume to threaten me with your petty human magicks.” 

The argument continues behind him, but Loki’s attention suddenly zeroes in on the gaudy pendant suspended from Strange’s neck. His breathing goes harsh and his pulse quickens as he feels the haunting ache of the pull from the stones, still a part of him— _always_ a part of him now, he supposes—their echoes recognizing another fragment and calling out to it. 

Loki sees himself reaching out for the stone and being killed immediately. 

He reaches for it again and succeeds, and when Thanos finds him, he is killed for his new prize. 

He reaches for it again and starts a battle that leads to the entire ship being destroyed, along with everyone in it. 

He reaches for it again and becomes a god—a _true_ god, higher than any in Asgard, higher than the gods _they_ prayed to. 

He reaches for it again and again and again, countless permutations of the same two seconds that splinter out into the universe. Every possibility spills out before him, overwhelming him to the point he doesn’t realize he’s screaming until _something_ —or someone, judging by how Stark is glaring at him—knocks him loose from his thoughts. 

He doesn’t recall pushing his hands into his hair or slumping against the wall, yet here he is, such a pathetic site in front of this just as pathetic group of mortals. 

“Okay, seriously. What the _hell_ is wrong with him?” Quill asks, frustration thick in his voice. “You act like you know him. What’s his deal? Is he always cuckoo like this?” 

Stark hesitates at Loki’s side before answering. “Not like this, exactly, but . . . yeah, seems about right.” 

“Go to Hel, Stark,” Loki practically spits out, gasping to try to settle his racing thoughts. Somewhere to his right, Strange speaks. 

“He’s accessing the time stone.” 

“How is that even possible?” Stark asks, mild alarm suddenly creeping into his tone. “I thought _you_ were that rock’s guardian. Maybe you should lock it up before Norman Bates here snaps your neck and takes it.” 

“I don’t know, I _am_ , and he’d die trying,” Strange rattles off in quick succession, and his conviction makes Loki laugh—hollow and bitter, but still a laugh. 

“I told you,” Loki starts, hating how his voice trembles but fighting past it anyway, “I’ve _changed._ ” 

“So it seems.” 

“Guys, I know I’m the new kid here and everything,” says a voice Loki definitely does not recognize, “but maybe we can save the posing and cool wizard fights for later?” 

Loki shifts and looks behind him to catch sight of the slight youth regarding him with obvious distrust. He recognizes that technology; it has Stark’s stench all over it as well as his tasteless color preferences, and he sneers at the Avenger to make it clear where his thoughts have turned. 

“Recruiting children into your battles now, are you? How _heroic_. Did you find you missed being the merchant of death?” 

Stark’s left cheek twitches, just below the eye, and he casts a glance over at Strange. “You know what? On second thought, maybe you should just open one of those portals and drop him into a wormhole somewhere.” Stark looks back at him with a nasty grin. “Maybe you can find Thanos again and go be where you’re _supposed_ to be—kneeling before _him_ like a good little lapdog.” 

Something in Loki breaks, something feral and only barely caged for so long. He lunges forward, moving faster than anyone on this ship can counter, and grabs Stark by the throat, hoisting him into the air as though he and his armor weigh nothing. 

“You will mind your tongue around me, you pitiful, _stupid_ little man. You will mind it, or I will remove it from your mouth and wear it as a feather pinned to my helm.” 

He laughs as Stark aims both repulsors at him, only for them to bounce harmlessly off the shield he constructs around himself—well, harmlessly to _him_. One goes astray and blasts a hole through the side of the ship. The other arcs sharply to the right and almost takes Quill’s head off. Loki regrets that it skews just a bit too far to connect. 

“Strange?” Stark chokes out. “A little help here?” 

“Just like old times,” Loki practically hisses before throwing Stark back to the ground like a child might with a toy he no longer wants. The analogy isn’t entirely out of place, he thinks, and he turns to regard Strange coolly. “No harm done.”

“You tried to choke me _again_ ,” Stark whines, drawing no further sympathy beyond a shrug from his assailant. 

“I did no such thing. Had I _tried_ to choke you, Stark, I would have done so. That was merely a suggestion.” 

“If you children are finished now,” Strange begins with the usual condescending lilt to his voice, and both Loki and Stark turn to gape at him. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m actually older than you,” Stark points out first, and Loki finds himself nodding along. 

“As am I. By quite a bit.” 

“Then act it, both of you. Whatever your . . . history,” Strange waves a dismissive hand to indicate the space between where Loki and Stark stand close to each other—close enough to strike, Loki notices, and he wonders, “put it aside, please. The continued existence of the universe is slightly more important than your petty squabbles.” 

“Petty—he threw me out a window ninety-six stories high! As in nine six! Without the suit!” 

“You survived. Do stop whining about that, won’t you?” 

“Okay, look, you deranged, antler-wearing freak—” 

Loki feels the spell settling over them just a split second before it takes hold, and he turns to fix Strange with an annoyed look when he realizes the sorcerer has, in his frustration, cast a spell to rob them of their voices. Stark, it seems, lags behind a few seconds, mouth working for a while before he finally realizes no sound is being produced. He looks at Loki accusingly and points at his mouth, to which Loki responds with a very mature hand gesture he’s picked up from Midgard that he’s sure will get his point across. 

“We don’t have time for this. Thanos will be coming here. He could be on his way right now. If you two won’t stop fighting with each other and help us, then I’ll have no problem feeding you to him as distractions while the rest of us actually do something useful. Understood?” 

“Yeah, man. They’re both pretty annoying,” Quill pipes up, and the dark look Strange shoots him gives away that he isn’t terribly fond of the Guardian, either. He says nothing to indicate the same, but he looks from Stark to Loki and back to Stark, then makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. 

The first words out of Stark’s mouth are this time directed at Strange. “You are the literal worst.” 

Loki can’t argue the point. “Agreed.” 

Strange retrieves his cloak and walks past them without another word. Loki considers tripping him (he wants to see _petty_ , after all). He does not, though, and instead just glares at Stark for several more moments before turning on his heel and stalking back out onto the dusty, ruined planet, wondering how his life has turned from running from Thanos to chasing the monster across the cosmos and now coming to the bastard’s home planet to await his arrival. 

No barren moon, indeed.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew plots their strategy for attacking Thanos when he arrives on Titan. Or, to be more precise, _most_ of the crew plots. Loki attempts to steal the time stone and instead falls through Yggdrasil's branches, learning more about his growing abilities--and his rapidly approaching fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Try as I might to break this up, it just wasn't working, so here. Have a supersize chapter. 
> 
> If you're 1) not into frostiron at all and 2) not into very one-sided and very vague frostiron, this is your last chance to bail out.
> 
> Also: I regret everything and nothing.

Maybe dying on the Statesman wouldn’t have been so bad after all. It would have been quick. All Thanos had to do was twist his hand just so and break Loki’s neck. Just a bit of pain and then nothing. It would have been easy. 

Or before that. He could have died any number of times: from Surtur, from Hela, from Kurse, from the Avengers, from the Chitauri, from the fall from the Bifrost, from any of the hundreds of minor skirmishes and larger battles he’d fought in his youth while on campaign with Asgard’s forces. 

Or at the very beginning, when he was an infant abandoned to the cold and to the fortunes of war. If he would have just starved or died of exposure, or if Odin had chosen a different method of eliminating the threat of an enemy prince . . . 

Loki considers all of these options, each one making him increasingly regretful they haven’t happened, all because whatever winding path has led him to this point is the cruelest one of all. 

Stark and Quill have been arguing for nearly twenty minutes. Loki is not about to admit that he thinks Stark has the better plan; it doesn’t surprise him, given he has no doubt Stark is infinitely more intelligent than the belligerent idiot arguing his case even after the Avenger has already explained to him in the simplest of terms why his plan is beyond stupid. But that doesn’t mean Loki has to _admit_ that. Stark’s ego is already beyond control. He doesn’t need to inflate it further. 

The insectoids are standing by helplessly, occasionally interjecting their own inane commentary. Drax is . . . well, as out of place as always, as near as Loki can tell. 

But Loki has no room in his thoughts for any of them, not when his entire being is drawn to Strange—no, to the gem hanging from his neck. Loki’s hands itch, _yearning_ to hold the stone and feel its power creep along his skin and sink in through the cracks to take root in his chest. 

With the others distracted and Strange too lost in his own powers to notice, Loki creeps closer, hand outstretched. If he could only _touch_ it— 

His fingertips just graze the stone before green energy, so similar to his own sorcery but of an entirely different flavor, sends him flying backwards, landing hard enough on the ground to knock the wind from his lungs. Dazed, he gasps up at the off-color sky and slides a hand over his eyes to stop the dizziness. 

When the hand comes away, he sees a sky fixed in eternal twilight above him. He lies at the bottom of a steep cliff, distinctly aware that every bone in his body has been smashed to pieces, and yet there is no pain. There is no fear. Only release and a strange sort of comfort. 

And there, at the top of the mountain, he catches a glimpse of red cloth flapping in the wind, and he thinks he hears a familiar voice crying out to him before it’s swallowed in the roar of a million thunderheads pounding out their battle cries at once. 

He blinks. The sky lightens. The cliff disappears. The flash of red, however, remains, and Loki groans when he recognizes the Avenger staring down at him with a thoroughly unimpressed expression. 

“Maybe you should learn to quit trying to take shiny toys that don’t belong to you. Just saying.” 

The Iron Man extends a hand as if to help him up, and Loki angrily brushes it away—tries to, at least, but the time stone’s energy is still heavy in his breast, even for as briefly as it touched him. The moment he brushes Stark’s bare hand, memories of lives never led and visions of lives he never _will_ lead flood into his mind, a hundred thousand potentials all exploding from a single point and spiraling outward. 

He is back in Stark’s tower. No. No, no, not this, not—not when he can still _feel_ the Other’s presence in his mind, oozing through the cracks in his mind and contaminating everything. He tries to turn from the path, but it carries him forward as though he’s been tied to rails.

Stark watches him with that infuriating smirk as he draws nearer. But this is . . . this is not what happened. Loki would remember. This was not his life. Not _his_ life. 

Stark ends the fight abruptly with a well-hidden repulsor that he uses to blast Loki through the next several walls. 

 _Flash._  

“Performance issues,” Stark says again, snapping into another vision. Loki grips his throat and _squeezes_. The Avenger falls dead at his feet. 

 _Flash._  

“You will all fall—” 

“Yeah, don’t think so.” 

Dual repulsor blasts send Loki crashing through the windows to an inevitably gruesome death at the bottom of the tower. 

 _Flash._  

“—when they’re so busy fighting you?” 

The scepter glows bright blue and _works_ this time, the energy sinking through Stark’s chest and turning those deep brown eyes to unsettling azure. Loki grins and— 

And kisses him. He doesn’t—but this isn’t— 

 _Flash_. 

The high-pitched tone of shattering glass. Stark’s robotic armor does not catch him in time, and he explodes in a mess of bones and blood and organs many dozens of stories below. 

 _Flash._  

Blue-eyed Stark this time joins him, takes him through the layers of the tower into the workshop area. The assorted Iron Man armors come to life, glowing green with Loki’s magic and powering up at his command. Beside him, Stark is perfectly emotionless. 

“You’ll enjoy this,” Loki tells him, knowing Stark will hate himself when the scepter’s hold over him is broken. 

 _Flash_. 

Atop the Tower now. Stark’s eyes are brown again. He looks around, horrified, at the carnage everywhere his gaze lands. 

“Loki,” he whispers, eyes wide and so, so desperate. “What did—what I do? What did you make me do?” 

Loki only laughs in response. 

 _Flash_. 

Blue eyes. Armor. But now flying in the suit under his own power, traveling right alongside Loki on one of the Chitauri’s flying devices, the two of them blazing through the air and marveling at the chaos unfolding far below. 

This time, _Stark_ laughs. 

 _Flash_. 

Somewhere Loki does not recognize. Possibly a living quarters area inside the tower, he supposes, judging from the view outside the window. 

He is sitting upright in a luxurious bed, apparently nude but for the sheets draped across his lower half. 

Stark stirs beside him and slings an arm across his thighs. 

“Morning,” the Avenger mutters, and he smiles faintly just a moment before he looks up. 

His eyes are brown. 

 _Flash_. 

“—when they’re so busy fighting you?” 

Stark shrugs and them grimaces, face sprayed with arterial blood as a knife is plunged into Loki’s neck and dragged to open the wound. It’s precise. Practiced. 

As he falls, gasping, he sees their redheaded assassin standing over him, her face betraying nothing. 

 _Flash_. 

A child. A young boy with piercing green eyes and light brown hair, and a mischievous but kind smile. The tip of his nose curls up into a delicate bend rather than terminating in the sharp point of Loki’s own. 

“Halvar!” Stark’s voice echoes from somewhere just outside the room. The boy looks at Loki, giggling, but Loki only grins and holds a finger up to his lips. “Hal, come on. This isn’t—” 

Stark enters the room and goes pale as snow, mouth dropping open as he takes in the sight before him. 

“Loki? You’re—how? I saw—I _saw_ you die.” 

“Evidently not. As it turns out, given how badly our fathers failed us, I couldn’t let myself fail our own child. You understand.” 

“You should have _stayed_ dead.” 

Loki’s nose erupts in a shower of blood when Stark’s fist connects with it. 

 _Flash_. 

Another lifetime. 

 _Flash._  

Another world. 

_Flash._

Another, another, another, another, one following the next in merciless succession, uncaring for how Loki begins to scream at them to just _stop_. 

 _Flash._  

_“Oh, great. And now he’s screaming. Guys, I think he’s broken.”_

_“Why is his head twitching like that? I thought the head-twitching thing was all you.”_

_“Tony, listen to me. It’s very important you tell me exactly what happened.”_

_“How should I know? I tried to help him up, he pushed me away, and then . . . this started.”_

Loki concentrates; _this_ is his timeline, and he grasps for the threads of this reality to try to anchor himself. 

They slip through his fingers, and then he is lost again, tumbling down through Yggdrasil’s branches. 

 _Flash_. 

“I’m having one.” 

Stark sets a drink in front of him anyway. Loki tastes the bitterness and notes it with vague interest, much to Stark’s obvious consternation. 

“Do you poison _all_ your guests’ drinks, or am I just special?” 

“The latter. Why aren’t you—” 

Loki downs the glass and then smashes it into Tony’s face. The Avenger tumbles backwards against the bar, blood clouding his eyes from the myriad gashes opened in his forehead, and Loki snarls. 

“Your tastes are terrible, by the way. You might have at least offered me something _good_.” 

“Fuck you,” Stark gets out while trying desperately to find a towel to clean his face. 

Loki chuckles. He thinks he might keep this human, controlled or not. 

 _Flash_. 

A very young girl. Dark eyes and even darker hair. She toddles after Stark through his workshop, undeterred by him gently chiding her about touching everything around her even as he tries to educate her about everything she picks up but isn’t supposed to handle. 

“Hey,” he starts, scooping her up into his arms to set her on a countertop. “Don’t touch my stuff.” 

“My stuff.” 

That seems to take Stark aback, as he bursts into a laugh and kisses her forehead. “Wow. Okay. That’s a little aggressive. You’re not wrong, though.” 

 _Flash._  

A room in darkness until a door creaks open, spilling light inside. Stark walks in, slow and silent, and sits down on the edge of a bed. Sleeping in that bed, Loki sees, is the same young girl from the immediately preceding vision. 

“Hey, sorry I gotta wake you up, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I just—I gotta talk to you for a second.” 

The girl stirs, grumbling and wiping at her eyes, and Stark smiles sadly at her. 

“I know, baby, I’m sorry. I’ll let you go back to sleep in just a minute, I promise, but I have to—come here,” he interrupts himself, pulling her out from under the covers to sit on his lap. Still not fully awake, she rests her head on his shoulder, and Stark leans his head against hers in turn, his hand rubbing a slow, soothing circle on her back. 

“Time for some real talk, kid. What I’m about to do tomorrow is . . . it’s dangerous. And I might not—I’m gonna do everything I can to come back to you and your mom, okay? But there’s a chance I might not, and I don’t want to scare you, but you need to know. Do you understand?” 

The girl says nothing, and Stark cranes his neck to look at her. 

“Hey. You listening to me?” 

The girl nods finally, blinking up at him, and Stark nods back in return, satisfied with that response. 

“Listen, no matter what happens, no matter _what_ , if you don’t remember anything else about me, I need you to know that I love you more than anything in the universe. You and your mom are the best things to ever, _ever_ happen to me, and—” 

He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. 

“I know that if this goes wrong and I don’t make it, you might be mad at me when you get older and think I just threw all this away. I would, if I were you. But I’m not. You’re better than that. You’re better than I was then. Hell, you’re better than I am now. And your mom’ll keep your head on straight. 

“But there are so many people out there—a _lot_ of them—who are wishing right now that they could hold their little girls too, and they can’t because some monster took their little girls away from them, or their little boys, or their mommies and daddies, or their brothers and sisters and everything else. It was before your time. I know this is the only world you’ve ever known, but I swear, Morgan, it was so much better before. _That’s_ the world I want you to grow up in.” 

Loki watches, uncertain why _this_ vision seems so much clearer and longer than the others, as Stark blinks back tears, visibly shining even in the dimness of the bedroom. 

“And I have a chance—a really small one—to make that happen and to fix this. To make things better for everyone. But most importantly, to make things better for you and your mom. So if I don’t come back, I hope you understand why I have to do this. And who knows? One day, maybe you can even forgive me.” 

“Daddy?” 

“Hmm?”  
  
“Can I go back to sleep now?” 

Stark laughs, a slightly wet, choked noise, and he nods, tenderly placing the child back onto the bed and pulling the blankets up around her. 

“Sure thing, squirt. God, I hope you remember at least part of that.” He rises to his feet but lingers at her side, one hand resting atop her head to stroke his thumb along her hairline. Then he leans in for one more (last?) kiss. “I love you, baby. So much. Sleep tight, okay?”

“Love you, daddy.” 

 _Flash_.

Crickets. The humid air of a late summer night. Acrid smoke in his nostrils. 

Loki blinks. This . . . _this_ part feels different, and he holds his breath, expecting the vision to pass as quickly as the others. When he finds he’s still there after several seconds, he pushes himself off the ground and gasps. Asgard burns in the distance, its ancient structures disappearing behind smoke and flames. There, at the same tree at the same place on the riverbank, sits Frigga, calmly working at her loom—the one which never left her special weaving room, not for as long as Loki can remember. 

“Mother?” 

She looks up and smiles at him with dull, glazed eyes. Her body has begun to decay, and the festering wound in her chest stinks with rot. Loki instinctively takes a step back. 

“Don’t be afraid, Loki. You’re seeing what you need to see.” 

“Enough,” he grinds out, forcing his hands into fists just to keep from pulling at his hair and revealing exactly how his nerves have frayed. “Enough with your riddles. Enough with this—this nonsense of these visions. Why won’t you tell me what’s happening? Why am I—why is this happening?” 

Frigga goes back to her weaving, humming softly under her breath for several seconds before speaking again. 

“I can’t answer everything for you, darling. But when you called my powers to you, when you called on the norns and the Great Tree, you . . .” She pauses with a sad smile, studying her tapestry at length until she begins working backwards as if to correct an error. “You’ve invited forces into your life you don’t know how to control. Not consciously, anyway. I can’t teach you how to do that. No one can. But you’re a clever boy. You’ll figure it out.”

Which answers absolutely nothing, and Loki has half the mind to topple the loom and pitch it into the river from sheer spite. 

A roar overhead draws his attention to a passing Chitauri Leviathan snaking its way across the sky. Loki’s gut churns, and yet Frigga does not even so much as glance at it. 

“This is your doing? Or the stones?” 

“Both, I think,” Frigga admits, something almost like regret coloring her tone. Her nimble fingers pause, twisting threads around her fingertips before she unexpectedly begins a new pattern in the middle of the old one. “I could never see the future, Loki, not precisely. I only saw possibilities. The shape of things, not the substance. You, though . . .” 

She finally looks away from her work, her smile grotesque on her decomposing face. Loki’s hand twitches, eager as it is to carve away at this monster until he reaches the sweet, beautiful mother he remembers. 

“You’re seeing other realms, my darling. Other outcomes as they’ve played out or _will_ play out in other worlds. I don’t know how you’re doing it. I’ve been trying to find the ends of your threads to see your tapestry, and all I’ve got . . .” She trails off and gestures to the helplessly tangled threads knotted into a ball between her feet. “Your fate is lost to me, Loki. That terrifies me. For the first time in my life, I don’t know anything about what might happen next. And I can’t see your future or even any hint of it, any possibility of it.” 

_“Damn you all.”_

_“I’m sorry, brother.”_

_“Don’t let them see you cry.”_

_“To be betrayed by my own father . . .”_

“I’m meant to die, aren’t I?” Loki asks, quite matter of factly. He hears thunder—a memory of it—in a twilit sky, and he sees something like Thor’s cape blowing in the wind atop an immense mountain, hears Thor’s bellows, sees himself contorted in death on a natural stone floor. 

“That’s . . . that’s what my existence is. In every world. Is to sacrifice myself, or to _be_ sacrificed, or to sacrifice so much that I might as well be the unlucky soul to face that judgment. Is that it? Every vision, every—all of this,” he adds, waving a hand to gesture to the burning palace in the near distance, to the massive warships overhead. “That’s all I am in every world: a sacrifice.” 

Frigga turns her head and begins the futile task again of trying to unravel the twisted, gnarled threads Loki supposes are meant to make up his life. 

“The norns have cut you loose. Your fate is your own now, Loki.” 

“Then why all these visions?” he cries, finally losing his calm. His voice cracks, making him flinch. Frigga does not look at him. “Why drive me to madness with all—” 

“Because you need to know what you’re capable of doing. And, I suppose, because those stones have touched your heart and are enhancing my own gifts to you, perhaps even Yggdrasil’s. The norns don’t know what to do with you anymore. You have no fate and yet _every_ fate.” 

Loki barks out a brittle laugh. “So my life has become such a disaster that even those old hags have had enough of me finally. Outstanding.” 

“It isn’t a punishment,” Frigga shoots back so sharply as to draw Loki up short. She has only ever taken that tone with him when he’s meant to pay attention, and even in a vision, even when she is dead, Loki _still_ straightens his back and shuts his mouth. “It is a _gift_. One you don’t and can’t fully grasp yet. But _think_ , Loki: the norns would not have freed you without a purpose in mind.” 

“Then let them tell me what it is, because clearly, I’ve made a mess of everything and don’t know what to make of their games.” 

A loud crashing noise draws his attention toward Asgard proper, and his lips thin into a tight line as he watches Gladsheim’s dome begin to collapse from the heat and damage of the fire raging through the city. 

“I don’t know your grand purpose in the universe, Loki. I only know your purpose in my life—and mine in yours.” 

She rises to her feet, and as the threads fall away from her, so does the terrible visage, leaving in its wake the same kind, unmarred face Loki remembers. The wound in her chest is gone as well, he notices, as she walks toward him, smiling kindly at him as she reaches up to cup both sides of his face. 

“You were brought into my life for a reason. I wanted a child I could pass my gifts to. Thor . . . I love him just as dearly as I love you, but we both know he has no talent for or interest in our craft. But _you_ , my brilliant, curious little boy . . . you took to it right away. I knew you would become a powerful sorcerer one day. I didn’t know _how_ powerful, but I could see it. I felt it in my heart. That was my purpose, Loki: to give you the gift of my sorcery and my visions and teach you to use them without letting them consume you.” 

Her smile turns melancholy. 

“I’m not sure I succeeded on the latter part. But oh, my darling, I love you so. Please don’t ever forget that.” 

Loki swallows hard, biting his bottom lip for a few moments to try to regain his composure before attempting to speak. 

“I won’t see you again, will I? Like this?” 

Frigga does not immediately answer, but the sudden twist of her mouth tells Loki all he needs. He shakes his head, stopped only by his mother’s hands firm and warm on either side. 

“I will always be with you, Loki, so long as you carry me in your memories and in your heart.” 

“Mother—” Loki cuts his words off short to stifle the urge to cling to her like a boy again, holding onto her skirts to selfishly keep her attention on him just a little longer. She turns to starlight in his embrace; he gasps and blinks and she is there again, unmoved, and he chokes on the pleas all struggling to make their way out of his mouth at once. “Mother, please. Don’t leave me. I—I—there’s still so much I need to learn. And you’re—I can’t lose you. You’re all I have.” 

Frigga’s tears fall without any accompanying noise from her throat, as graceful and serene as the rest of her. 

“I’ve taught you all I know. And you still have me, _inn lítli_. You will _always_ have me. And your father, and your brother. Even if we aren’t with you in body. Your heart has always held far more than just the hate and bitterness you think are there alone.” 

She uses the hands still on Loki’s face to pull him down to her height, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to his forehead. And Loki, unable to fight anymore, releases the sobbing noise that’s been lodged in his throat and wraps his arms around her, squeezing until he thinks it might hurt if this were truly in the physical world. 

“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry. It was—I was the one who told Kurse. I—I told him—I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t _know_. I—” 

“Shh. None of that matters now. Go, Loki. Your fate is your own now. Make it count.” She presses another kiss, quicker this time, to his hairline. “I love you.” 

Loki ignores the sensation of her body softening in his arms, ignores the first sparks like fireflies in the summer night air. 

“I love you. And I never thanked you for . . . for anything. I _will_ see you again, Mother,” he promises, perhaps the only true thing he has ever said his life, heart clenching when he sees her body slowly dematerializing into a million tiny points of light. “And I will make you proud.” 

“You always have, Loki,” she murmurs, her voice already sounding as if it is traveling from a distant room, far away and detached. “My son.” 

With barely as much as a breath, she is gone, nothing but light in his hands that he tries to hold onto, to no avail. The glowing orbs ascend, like the ash from Asgard’s remains in the distance, to return her to the stars.

 

 

_“Why is he just staring up at the sky like that?”_

_“How should I know? Do I look like an expert on weird-ass alien god-things?”_

_“You’re the one who’s dealt with him before.”_

_“Yeah, we were trying to murder each other, Quill. We didn’t get a lot of quality time in for psych evals.”_

Loki comes back into this reality— _his_ reality, at last—with a gasp, the frayed ends of the norns’ tapestry, whatever remains of his fate, dangling before him, and he _clings_ until he’s certain he’s anchored securely.

“Uh. Okay then. I’m just . . . gonna go somewhere else now.” 

Quill walks away, still casting the occasional confused glance over his shoulder at Loki. But Stark . . . Stark stays, brow furrowed, and Loki sneers up at him. 

“What do you want?” 

“Just wondering if all wizards can trip balls without any apparent drugs or if you and Strange are just freaks.” 

Loki turns his head, which Stark evidently takes as an invitation to sit down beside him, his armor creaking slightly with the movement. 

“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay because quite honestly, I don’t really care. I’m still a little sore over that whole attempted hostile takeover thing.” Loki rolls his eyes but keeps quiet. “But we _could_ really use the help. So . . .”

“So what?” Loki all but hisses, hating how his voice trembles to match the hands he fists into the ground. Stardust still floats in his vision. 

“So I was hoping that you might be a little more help than Strange. You tried to grab the time stone and it put you on your ass. Then you touched _me_ and went on a happy little vision quest yourself, from the looks of it. So is there anything you saw that you want to tell us?” Loki looks up at him and squints, trying to make out Tony’s face, silhouetted as it is with the sun behind him. “Anything I should know?” 

_I saw you die._

_I saw myself killing you._

_I saw you killing me._

_I saw you ruling by my side, your mind broken, your spirit destroyed._

_I saw you ruling by my side, your mind clear and still your own, your spirit soaring beyond your darkest dreams._

_I saw us as lovers, our bodies as tangled together as the threads damning me to this world and to these sights never to come to pass._

_I saw us as enemies, rivals full of nothing but hatred and a driving need to destroy each other._

_I saw our child._

_I saw our children._

_I saw you die and then our half-mortal children after you, and I mourned and spent the rest of eternity aching for those lost to me._

_I saw you wither and succumb to your terribly short lifespan._

_I saw myself holding you as your life slipped away, begging you not to leave me as well._

_I saw you accepting Idunn’s apples, and I saw myself tasting the sweetness of your new life on your lips._

_I saw you refusing Idunn’s apples, and I saw myself pleading with you to reconsider._

_I saw us traveling the cosmos, crossing centuries and galaxies like mere stepping stones in a river._

_I saw millennia in your soul and the light of all that accumulated knowledge in your eyes._

_I saw you die._

Loki looks over at Stark, mask firmly and confidently in place. “No.” 

Stark lifts an eyebrow, clearly skeptical. “Really? Nothing?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Huh.” The Avenger’s shoulders slump, just enough for Loki to notice. “I was kinda hoping you’d be . . .” He waves a hand toward where Strange sits several yards away, no longer twitching but still very clearly lost to his own thoughts. 

“Better?” Loki asks, unable to stop the grin tugging at his mouth, and Stark wrinkles his nose slightly. 

“More helpful.” 

“Close enough. I’ll accept that.” Loki winces as he pulls one knee to his chest, a by now familiar ache traveling through the leg and piercing through to the core. The injuries will never heal properly, not completely, he thinks, and he wonders what sort of damnable sorcery or weaponry Proxima Midnight must have used to not only break the bones, but to keep them from mending back together as seamlessly as they should have done. 

A pebble goes flying by, and he realizes he and Stark both are watching it with mild curiosity (well, Stark’s curiosity is admittedly more intense) as it travels a couple feet away and then begins to drift upward. 

“Strange says he saw fourteen million outcomes,” Stark points out, picking up a larger pebble to continue his experiments, ever the diligent scientist. He tosses it, nodding to himself when it travels a little farther and hovers before slowly sinking toward the ground. 

“And I suppose you asked him for the best one?” 

“I asked him how many we win.” 

An even larger rock follows, this time succumbing to the planet’s weakened but still present gravitational pull and sinking more rapidly than the others. 

“He said just one.” 

Loki snorts despite himself and shakes his head, ignoring the way an echo of another version of himself wants to return Stark’s wry grin suddenly aimed at him. 

“Yeah. Ditto. But hey, second opinions never hurt, so what do you think are the odds we happen to be living in that one?” 

Loki rubs at his aching knee to try to soothe the dull throbbing deep in the bone. 

“One in fourteen million, evidently. But in practical terms? Extraordinarily slim.” 

“Yeah,” Stark agrees, looking down as he rakes his fingers across the sandy ground, leaving ridges between them, tiny mountains Loki could sweep away with ease—but doesn’t. “That’s what I get for being a realist.” 

“You are no such thing.” Stark tips his head, obviously intrigued, and Loki shrugs. “You removed your armor and confronted me in your tower, knowing I had every intention of killing you, and you decided to suddenly flyte with me for no reason. I must confess that I’ve missed that. Odin banned me from court flytings centuries ago. Not that that stopped me from participating and _winning_ , mind you,” he adds with a smirk. “But not as myself. You gave me that chance again.”   

“Am I supposed to know what half that means? And also, you didn’t win _shit_ , Loki. Not with me, not with the Avengers, not with Earth.” 

“Yes, yes, I know.” Loki rolls his hand around on his wrist in a supremely dismissive gesture. Another rock, the largest yet, leaves Stark’s hand and sinks, still not as quickly as it should, but it’s another data point for Stark, no doubt. 

“You create machines and weapons and all manner of things most of your kind could never imagine, things which _should_ be impossible, but you simply refuse to listen to the logic of your world or to let it constrain you,” Loki goes on, draping an arm over his knee. “You bend it as you please and in ways few among your people can. You have a kind of sorcery in you, Stark. And by definition, no sorcerer of any kind is ever a _realist_.” 

“Oh, goodie, I get to join the wizard club now,” Stark grumbles, but he’s smiling faintly anyway—genuinely, Loki guesses, as it’s missing the sharp edge he’s accustomed to seeing from the Avenger. 

 _I saw you die._  

_I saw us._

_I saw a hundred thousand lifetimes with you, and I wanted more._

_I saw you die a thousand times by my hand._

_I saw you take my life and gloat, or weep, or feel nothing at all._

_I saw my world begin and end with you._

_I saw you die._  

Loki looks away, pulling his helmet off and then reaching a hand beneath the collar of his coat to rub at his neck. It’s only when he sees Stark peering closer in his peripheral vision that he lets the collar snap back into place, turning his head sharply to glare at his unwanted audience of one. 

“What happened to you?” 

Against his better judgment, Loki laughs. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be rather more specific than that.” 

To Loki’s surprise (and, to at least a few thousand versions of himself, his delight), Stark chuckles as well. “Okay, fair. I kinda set myself up for that one.” His gaze fixes on the still bruised flesh of Loki’s throat, and as defiant as ever, Loki juts his chin up in full regal haughtiness, brazenly showing off the mottled skin left visible over the top of his collar. Stark, every bit as thirsty for knowledge as Loki himself, leans forward just a little, eyes making tiny darting movements as he takes in all which is revealed to him and forming hypotheses about what _isn’t_ revealed, but then he simply sits back again and tosses another rock out into the air. 

“You saw something that freaked you out. And when you were in the _process_ of freaking out, you were . . . you were different.” He pauses, huffing a little when Loki remains silent. “Your eyes turned gold, and there was all this energy pouring out of you. It was—look, you’re still a son of a bitch, but I’m not gonna pretend like it wasn’t something to see.” 

“I saw—” 

 _I saw you die._  

“I saw many possibilities, none of which I think will come to pass. Not in this world.” He tilts his head to stare down at the lines Stark’s fingers had pulled through the sand. “Missed opportunities, I suppose.” 

Stark goes quiet for a moment, then flicks a hand out in a vague gesture Loki takes to mean he’s to look at the horizon. 

“I guess if we’re all gonna die here whenever Angry Barney shows up, we could really have _worse_ scenery.” 

“I’m sure that will be of great comfort as he slaughters the lot of us.” 

Stark’s gaze flicks over to the youngest among them, the young boy speaking with Mantis. It moves away quickly, but not quickly enough to keep Loki from noticing. 

“Be straight with me here. You and Quill’s crew are the only ones to face off against this guy. We’ve only had the previews so far. What are we really looking at here?” 

Pressure at his throat. Suffocation. Bones cracking. The terror of having his mind split open again and reshaped into whatever Thanos and his minions want it to be. 

Loki shivers involuntarily but forces himself to meet Tony’s eyes anyway. 

 _I saw you die._  

“Annihilation.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _inn lítli_ = "little one," approximately.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If one sorcerer nearly took out Thanos during the battle on Titan, what could _two_ sorcerers do? 
> 
> Quite a lot, as it turns out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er...battle scenes aren't my forte. This might get reworked later, but I'm tired of looking at it and haven't updated in a while, so here you go.

The Earth wizard means to talk Thanos into submission. Loki is certain of it, and he nearly wants to form his magic into a tangible razor-thin wire, loop it around the Titan’s neck from behind, and _pull._

But that’s not the plan, and so Loki stays quiet and waits, crouched behind a piece of debris from the wrecked ship. His heart races wildly, pounding so hard he thinks his ribs are vibrating with it, and his hands are trembling with excitement. With fear. With the promise of battle. For all his problems with Asgard and its disproportionate emphasis on its warrior culture, it is still part of him, still part of his life and history and soul. His rational mind tells him he hates the simple-minded martial attitude permeating throughout all of Asgard; his heart and his memories, though, remind him of standing at the edge of a battlefield while on campaign with Asgard’s forces, the promise of a coming battle singing to him and stirring his blood while he stood at his brother’s side, both of them staring down the gathering enemy forces assembling before them. 

“Congratulations. You’re a prophet.” 

“I’m a survivor.” 

_So am I, monster_ , Loki thinks as he slips forward into position, silent as death and twice as ruthless. Laeveteinn, his ancestral sword normally kept in the pocket dimension in which he stashes everything for easy access later, rests in his right hand, a warm, familiar weight that settles his nerves and grounds him to the present when his thoughts want to pull him both forward and backward through time. This sword has slain monsters before: trolls, goblins, other sorcerers, and more; it seems fitting that he should pull it from storage and cleanse it with new blood. 

_“Steady_ , _”_ he urges his unlikely teammates telepathically, grinning to himself when he hears Stark’s voice cut through the chaos in his mind, sharp and exacting. 

_“I’m still not okay with you being in my head.”_

_“That’s too bad. Are you ready?”_

_“Say when.”_

Loki’s breath quickens when he feels another powerful mage’s spellwork manifesting out of the latent energy of the universe around them. His own responds in kind, like recognizing like, and it’s something like a sense of ecstasy that makes Loki stand to his full height behind Thanos, still undetected, Laeveteinn shimmering with a faint green glow. 

Strange begins to work his craft, orange light forming at his hands, and Loki gives him a brutal smile. He does not like this annoying Midgardian, but even he can acknowledge powerful magicks when he sees them, when he _feels_ them, and with Strange’s magic feeding into his own and vice versa, it’s all Loki can do not to give into the sensation entirely. Not yet, at least. 

_“When, Stark.”_

_“On it.”_  

“I think you’ll find our will equal to yours.” 

“Ours?” 

A split second before Thanos realizes a massive piece of the ship is hurtling down at him, pushed along by the Iron Man, Loki teleports far enough away to not be caught in the impact. When the rubble bursts apart and Thanos emerges, clearly enraged, Loki is there to greet the Titan, free hand out. 

“I hope you don’t die _too_ quickly,” he says, voice pitched low and deadly, before unleashing a burst of power from his palm that erupts into hundreds of glass-like shards of pure energy, countless miniature blades all heading directly for Thanos. The Titan snarls and brushes most of them off by channeling the space stone and stopping them in their tracks, but Loki concentrates, telekinetically forcing as many around the stone’s pull as he can. 

He cheers inwardly when a few escape and hit their marks, pushing into the Titan and _through_ , embedding themselves deep in Thanos’s body. But before the energy can escape, Loki wills them into solid form, vicious and proud as Thanos howls in pain. Loki twists his palm, dragging the now physical blades with the movement, and then curls his fingers inward, squeezing the shards through Thanos’s body and steering them toward the heart. 

“You incessant pest!” Thanos roars as he uses the space stone again to forcefully eject the blades. The reality stone activates as the wounds close over, and Loki has just enough time to teleport away again before the projectiles reach him. When he lands, he watches Thanos transform the rubble into bats which drive Stark away momentarily. 

_“Really, Stark? Winged rats can best you?”_

_“Now’s really not the time for banter, you asshole,”_ Stark shoots back, even though Loki swears he can _hear_ the smirk in Stark’s thoughts as they pass along the telepathic link he opened for the team. 

Drax and the spider child attack but are easily thrown aside. When Strange steps in, an energy blade at the ready, Loki sees his chance and joins him, teleporting in directly behind Thanos and driving Laeveteinn into what _should_ be the Titan’s back—but the reality stone activates again, making him hit only air, and then a powerful backhand sends him flying until he’s caught by strong arms. Shielded arms, he notices, and he groans. 

“Really, Loki?” Stark asks with his regular voice now, looking down at the god he holds under the arms. “A pimp slap can best you?” 

“You’re on my list for when this is over,” Loki mutters, nearly meaning it when Stark abruptly drops him back into the thick of it as he flies by. Loki rolls gracefully, injured legs and all, and springs back up into a crouch, slashing with a short dagger now just as Drax is doing with his own sword. 

Moving quickly as thought, he dodges Thanos’s annoyed swat again and this time lands a hit with the sword, slashing across the front of the Titan’s armor. Thanos snaps Strange’s energy sword before focusing on the real one Loki wields, then simply reaches out for Loki’s head with frightening quickness. It’s so reminiscent of the Statesman that Loki freezes for a second—but a second is all Thanos needs to grab him by the throat again. 

“I should have let the Chitauri keep you,” he says, reaching up to break one of the horns from Loki’s helmet. Loki himself squirms, unable to breathe, unable to _think_ to try to call on his magic to let him teleport away. He’s choking again, his lungs are burning, and he sees Eira floating in the emptiness of space once more. 

One massive purple hand thrusts the broken horn forward—a fatal blow, Loki thinks, except that orange tendrils wrap around him and tug him free from the Titan’s grasp. The horn still digs through the right side of his chest, but it doesn’t make it far through the layers of armor and his own unnaturally dense skin. 

He lands hard on his back to find Strange standing over him, performing a quick once-over before nodding and redirecting his attention to Thanos again. Loki pries the horn loose, frowns when he sees blood on the pointed end that had just been used to stab him, and then tosses it aside. He isn’t dead yet, and at this point, he simply _refuses_ to die until he’s seen the life drain from Thanos’s eyes, preferably by his own actions. 

Quill leaps by and disappears into another portal just as an explosion shakes the ground. Loki rolls out of the way to avoid another chunk of debris and to take a moment to catch his breath and assess the damage to his side (not too bad, he determines; not lethal, at least, which is good enough for him). 

_“Fire in the hole!”_ is all the warning he gets before Stark flies by again, dropping a line of missiles that make the immediate area erupt into explosive flames. Loki once again barely has time to teleport himself to safety, and when he finds his footing again, it’s with a slew of curses aimed directly at Stark’s brain. 

Nothing is sticking. Even with all of their power, Thanos is shrugging everything off as if they are children play-wrestling with their father. Even when another player enters the field, another oddly colored woman who emerges from a crashed ship with blood in her teeth and hatred in her eyes, Thanos continues to fling them aside like gnats. 

Loki staggers to his feet, panting, and watches as Parker is swatted away, his quickness not enough to allow him to gain a foothold. Drax, a warrior who aside from his skin and odd markings would not be terribly out of place on Asgard, is kicked away like no more than a pebble. Even Stark’s missiles seem to have had no effect. 

Loki is already mourning their futile struggle until Strange begins attacking again. 

The original theory, Loki sees now, was correct all along: there is little they can do to him physically, but the Titan has very few defenses against magic. With a nod at Strange, Loki closes his eyes, arms outstretched as he loses himself to the new sources of power that have taken up residence in him since the Statesman. Arcane winds suddenly whipping his coattails behind him, he feels himself beginning to hover off the ground, his magic surging through his blood and spilling forth from every pore, enveloping him in a cocoon of golden light that shields him from the debris hurtling at him from all sides. 

“Mother,” he whispers, breath quickening with the sensation of fire crawling through his veins, “Norns, Yggdrasil: I need you. Again.” 

With a sensation as if his spine is breaking, he screams, bending backwards as his sorcery pours out of him, flattening the area immediately around him with a devastating energy pulse. He is being remade, he thinks, turned inside out, stripped to the core and rebuilt into something he does not recognize but which he hopes is strong enough to withstand not only Thanos, but whatever these forces are doing to him. 

When he opens his eyes again, he sees the light from the infinity stones first, tendrils of blue, red, pink, and yellow reaching out toward him, whispering promises of godhood and all the power contained in the nebulous beginnings of the universe—the power to remake it and the power to end it. And he _wants_ it. Norns help him, he _wants_ it. 

He reaches forward, pulling at the thread leading back to the reality stone. It rushes into the opening he provides for it, twisting the world around him until it looks more like Titan may have before. But no. Loki will not allow the monster to fight on his home turf, even if he is literally doing so; he will not give him the comfort of seeing his home again, even in a distorted memory, when Loki’s own home and people are gone. 

He clings to the vestiges of the reality stone, not quite wielding it himself but clinging to it, threading it with his own sorcery until it relents to his bidding. In an instant, the lush, green world around them transforms into the cold, blue night of a frozen planet, forever caught in the shadows and blocked from the sun’s warming rays. 

Loki gasps with exertion, but he smiles when he sees the surprise on Thanos’s face—and on Strange’s behind him. 

“We fight on my terms now,” he points out, snarling with too many teeth set in a face of dark azure broken up only by ancestral markings. “And from one monster to another: welcome to Jotunheim.” 

_“Loki, what the hell did you do?”_ Stark demands, and Loki revels in how it sounds as if the Avenger’s teeth are chattering. Indeed, the human drops down to land beside him, revealing a thin coat of frost already muting the red and gold of his armor. Stark pulls up short, and Loki imagines his eyes must be huge within the confines of his helmet. _“And what the hell did you do to yourself?”_

Loki’s only answer is to tip his head back and feel just an echo of his homeland’s power—it isn’t real, it isn’t _real_ , his mind repeats—sinking into his bones. Rime and frost form a thick outer layer on his skin, an extra level of armor, he supposes, and while the Casket of Ancient Winters must have been destroyed along with the rest of the relics in the treasure vault on Asgard, he feels the phantom pull of its energy between his hands anyway, calling to him, surging through his blood and erupting outward in arcing spikes from his fingertips. 

Thanos grunts and stumbles back as the first blast hits his chest, snapping just a small but noticeable section of his armor off. Behind him, Strange redoubles his efforts, his hands forming patterns Loki doesn’t recognize but which send orange cable-like tendrils out to wrap around Thanos’s arms to pull them taut out to the sides. Strange digs in his heels to brace himself as the cables wind around his own arms as anchor points. 

They can do this. 

For the first time, Loki begins to think they, arguably the two most powerful sorcerers in existence, both of them wielding a power Thanos is vulnerable to, can actually do this. 

The temperature continues to drop—or _seems_ to drop—as blinding snow begins to whip around them. Loki doesn’t let up, using a relic which no longer exists and which isn’t even _there_ to augment his own abilities, calling upon his ancestral source of power to gird himself and channel his own innate sorcery through. Thick ice begins to encase Thanos’s feet, then his ankles, his shins, securing him in place. He begins to shake with the cold—as do the others, Loki notices, but he ignores them for now, such is his single-minded focus on bringing the Titan to his knees. Even the worst of Jotunheim is not as cold as the emptiness of space to which the surviving Asgardians were subjected by Thanos’s doing; Thanos showed them no mercy, and so Loki will show him none in return. 

“Are you cold?” he asks in a voice he doesn’t fully recognized as his own, head tilting to the side as he stretches out a hand toward Thanos. The Titan roars at him, struggling against his bonds, and Loki smiles, cruel and showing far too many teeth. “Allow me to help.” 

As before on the Statesman, he imagines the oxygen in Thanos’s blood, pinpoints every atom and then ignites them all with little more than a thought. Thanos throws his back and screams in agony as green flames erupt from seemingly every pore and orifice, and Loki _laughs_ , choking on the noise as he watches the Titan’s skin begin to boil away. 

_It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t—_

Is it? 

He finds he doesn’t care, and he reaches out his other hand, imagining each individual rib in the Titan’s chest snapping one by one, pushing outward to pierce through muscle and flesh and armor. He uses his telekinesis to pull at the fragments, ripping them free one by one until they circle him in midair like an especially grotesque halo, purple blood dripping onto his clothing and the ground below him. 

“Loki, stop!” Stark shouts, and Loki barely registers the Iron Man’s presence in the air next to him. He may as well be on another plane for how far gone into his madness Loki is. “You need to stop. You’re gonna kill the rest of us!” 

“As long as he dies, too.” 

“I can’t . . . hold him,” Strange gets out just before the chill overtakes him as well, snapping the energy ropes and breaking his grip. Thanos growls and lashes out, jerking back with the gauntlet until a brilliant flash of red sends Loki and Stark alike tumbling back to the ground. Loki hits first, coughing from the force of the fall and the dust he inhaled upon landing, and sees that his skin has returned to the same shade that had always been a lie before. The snow is gone, the wind, the cold—and when he turns his head, he sees Thanos no longer burning and ripped to shreds, but whole and _enraged_.

But Loki has done his part. The Titan is angry enough to no longer be thinking clearly. He sees Loki as the primary threat, or at least the primary source of annoyance, so much so that he forgets about the powerful mage still behind him who is moments away from ensnaring him again. He is taken wholly off-guard by the spider child pulling a web across his chest and holding him back, by Quill’s electrical trap pinning one arm to the ground, by the magic and Stark alike pulling at the gauntlet, and by Mantis dropping onto his shoulders to attempt to sedate him. 

But Loki too is exhausted, trembling as he tries to push himself off the ground with limbs that suddenly feel much too weak to support his weight. He struggles to his knees and knows he can go no further, so he stays where he is, summoning his last reserves. He braces himself in the dirt, holds out his hands, and focuses on the gauntlet, offering what little remains of his powers to augment his telekinesis and help the others pull at the gauntlet. 

“I thought you'd be harder to catch. For the record, this was my plan. Not so strong now, huh? Where is Gamora?” 

Loki grits his teeth and glares at Quill, grinding out a warning that he’s certain is lost in the commotion. 

“My . . . Gamora . . . ?” 

Loki tunes them out, not at all concerned with what Quill and Thanos have to say to each other. He focuses only on the gauntlet, ignoring the siren call of the stones whispering in his mind, showing him all the ways they could be _his_ ; they lie as well as he ever could, he knows, but they make such a pretty picture, showing him life as a _true_ god with all the power of the cosmos at his literal fingertips. 

And Stark—he is intelligent enough. He could rule at Loki’s side, perhaps at long last fulfilling the destiny Loki had _tried_ to bring about years ago in New York, the same destiny that so many other versions of him had caused. A blue-eyed Stark there by force, or a brown-eyed one there of his own volition; it mattered little to Loki, not with the poisonous fantasies the stones kept feeding him. 

The stones are right there, so close, so ripe for the taking—they _want_ him to take them, he thinks, and he whines in response to their calling out to him. 

“He took her to Vormir,” he hears as if from somewhere much more distant than just a few feet away, and it takes him a moment to recognize the source as the blue woman who has just arrived. “He came back with the soul stone, but she didn’t.” 

Something in Loki’s gut clenches for reasons he can’t name, perhaps the stones’ residual energy in him screaming out for their remaining brethren, and he looks up in time to see Stark’s helmet retracting as he frantically tries to reach out to Quill. 

“Okay, Quill, you gotta cool it right now, you understand?” Quill doesn’t respond, and Stark’s voice turns desperate. “Don’t—don’t—don’t engage. We’ve almost got this off!” 

_I could stop this_ , he thinks, eyes locking onto the gauntlet. _I only need those stones. I only need_ — 

He hears them singing in his mind, energy stroking over him like a lover’s caress, and he stumbles his way to his feet. He could wield them far more skillfully than this purple clod ever could. Thanos’s ambitions are flawed and small; he wants to eradicate half the universe, and to what ends? So it can repopulate in a few dozen years? No. No, he thinks on much too small a scale; he could create an entirely _new_ universe, _infinite_ universes full of grateful beings keen to worship him as a benefactor, a savior who delivered them from themselves. 

“Loki?” he hears from Stark, his voice slightly distorted through the helmet. “Oh, what the fuck _now_? You’ve lost your goddamn mind too?” 

Loki doesn’t realize he’s honed in on the stones—on the space stone especially, as that's the one with which he is most intimately familiar of the ones Thanos currently wields—until he feels a repulsor blast hit him directly in the chest. It’s low power, certainly only a warning shot, and he blinks in angry surprise at Stark. 

“You _dare_ —” 

“One power-hungry asshole at a time, please,” Stark has just enough time to get out before everything falls apart. 

Thanos breaks free of their control, sending the lot of them hurtling as he lashes out with a tremendous pulse of energy that makes the entire atmosphere glow with power. When Loki’s vision clears, he looks up to see, much to his horror, that Thanos has harnessed the power of one of Titan’s smaller moons, breaking it into pieces and yanking to send the debris hurtling toward the planet’s surface. 

Stark gets pummeled to the ground by a chunk of the debris, and that’s the last thing Loki sees before the world explodes into chaos.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The battle on Titan concludes, and Loki begins to understand the payment for the magic debt he has racked up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive! 
> 
> Yeah, sorry about that. Life happened. The next chapter is mostly written, so hopefully it won't be as long before the next one up. For those of you who've stuck around, thank you so much! 
> 
> (Also, 30k+ words later, I've finally gotten out of the Infinity War portion of the Endgame fix-it I originally planned to write. Oy vey.)

Loki is beginning to grow uncomfortably familiar with waking up in someone else’s reality.

Presuming that’s what this is, of course; for all he knows, perhaps he’s simply gone mad after all, a delayed but predictable result of his years of dabbling in the arcane with his fractured mind. Or maybe these are only visions, nothing more than simple dreams made more vivid by his ever-active imagination. 

He steps closer to the cacophony, unable to make out any one person’s voice as several blend together at once. At least two men are arguing, possibly more. A child is crying. A woman’s voice cuts through the din, even as quietly as she’s speaking. Metal clanks against metal, scrapes against stone, and overlaying all of it is the unmistakable hissing of a serpent. 

So he is in the cave again, Loki realizes, the same one in which he first met his most unusual double, the one with long hair the color of a sunset. The woman at his side is there again, though this time her cloak is pushed back to reveal messy blond hair and a tear-streaked face. She clutches a crying young boy to her chest while another, seemingly not much older than the first, clings to her side, face half-buried in her skirts. Her hand is a steady presence against the back of his head, and he seems to settle a little when her fingers card through his hair. 

Loki keeps to the shadows, well aware of where he belongs, and crouches behind a large stone to peer into a scene which is at once intimately familiar and yet wholly foreign to him. The other Loki is unchained this time. Instead, he rests on his knees, hands bound by thick rope wound so tightly about his wrists that his fingers have gone dark. He is stripped bare but for a simple loincloth, perhaps only there to grant him some small degree of modesty, and his thin shoulders tremble under the massive hands clamped down atop them. Those hands belong to a new player, one Loki doesn’t immediately recognize, with brilliant red hair and matching eyes that are startlingly bright even in the darkness of the cave. 

A hammer which looks much like Mjolnir hangs from the man’s belt. 

“—my friend, you understand, they’re innocent.” 

Loki draws his attention to his double and only then notices that he’s pleading to the old man standing tall before him. Even without hearing the man speak, without knowing anything else about him, Loki understands innately the sort of power in the set of the old man’s shoulders. And when he lifts his head to reveal the eye patch and the cold determination in his remaining eye, when the immense raven on his shoulder caws, Loki shudders. The details in the appearance may differ slightly, but there is no mistaking Odin’s power in any form, in any reality. 

“So was my son.” 

The double falters and twists under the would-be Thor’s grip to cast a glance behind him at the woman and children. Then he turns to face Odin again. 

“It was only meant to be a joke! Odin, please. Please. If our friendship ever meant anything to you, if _I_ ever meant anything to you, please, punish me. Take my life if that’s what you want. But they’ve done nothing wrong. Would you be so cruel as to take not only a woman’s husband from her, but her children as well? Odin. Brother.” 

The old king stands silent and unmoving, and the double cranes his neck to look up at Thor, voice cracking when he dares to speak again. 

“Thor, please! We’re friends, aren’t we? You—you’ve been as an uncle to my boys. They trust you. Don’t—Thor, I won’t fight you. Kill me. Do what you will. Please, just don’t . . . I can’t . . .” 

The other world’s thunder god looks away, but his grip does not loosen. 

The double chokes back a sob and whips his head back to glare at Odin again, lips curled back into a vicious snarl. “Haven’t you taken enough from me? Is there _any_ child you won’t imprison, or exile, or enslave?” 

The old king stands impassive, head turning slightly to the side as he calls over his shoulder. “Tyr.” 

Another figure steps forward, formerly lost in the cave’s darkness, a hulking warrior of a man with a stern expression that may as well have been carved from the rock walls themselves. 

“Bring the children to me.” 

“No!” The woman pushes the older child behind her, all while simultaneously trying to comfort the shrieking toddler in her arms. “You can’t have them. You will need to kill me first.” 

“I take no joy in this, Sigyn. But your husband—” 

His words are lost to Loki, drowned by the screaming woman and the sounds of scuffling as she fights the man prying her children from her, as the double struggles in vain against the thunder god holding him on his knees, as the young boys begin to wail for their parents. 

The large man—Tyr, apparently—decides on a new tactic and instead folds his massive arms around the woman to restrain her, only renewing the double’s frenzied writhing on the ground and guttural shouting that echoes off the cave walls until it becomes a terrible, steady droning sound. 

“Come, children,” Odin urged, kneeling and beckoning the boys to him. The older one takes the younger’s hand and approaches readily, cautious under the circumstances but with the certainty of one approaching a trusted family friend. 

Loki’s stomach twists. 

“I apologize for what I’m about to do,” Odin goes on, reaching out to rest one hand against the older boy’s shoulder, the other against the younger boy’s cheek. “And I’m sorry you were burdened with a worthless, cowardly beast for a father. Know that you have only ever been pawns to him—” 

“Lies! You _lie_ , and you _lie_ , and you _lie_!” the double shrieks from where he’s now been pressed to the ground, helpless against Thor’s knee pressing into his back and the full weight of the god holding him against the stone floor. “Boys! Run!” 

Odin shoots him a withering glare before looking back at the children, glance darting from one to the other until it settles on the younger one. “Close your eyes, Narfi.” 

 

 

When Loki comes back to awareness on Titan, he does so with a wolf’s howl ringing in his ears and the ghostly sensation of iron digging into his flesh, and with a heart made brittle for its shattered pieces cutting away at his chest. 

Blinking smoke and debris from his vision (and attempting to clear his head of any lingering memories/visions/omens/whatever they may be), it’s all he can do to turn his head and watch as the world ends around him. The spider child swings by, desperately attempting to catch the Guardians as they fly through the air, knocked about the planet’s ruined surface and weakened gravitational pull. To his left, the Midgard sorcerer gets tossed like a child’s doll, head cracking sharply against a stone; he falls to the ground, motionless, and Loki knows instinctively the human teeters on the very brink of death. And then, as if this can possibly get any more absurd, Stark swoops in, valiantly, _stupidly_ attempting to fight Thanos on his own. 

_I saw you die._  

“Tony,” he drags out on a ragged breath, fighting against the drain on his powers and the pull of other lives or realities attempting to keep him down. Like a butterfly with its wings pinned to a board for someone else’s sadistic pleasure. Like a failure. 

Fourteen million outcomes Tony had told him Strange had seen, and yet Loki is certain he’s seen more, _lived_ more, and they all exist in his mind now, drifting by on smoke and clouding his thoughts until he can barely remember what part of this world is real and what isn’t. 

Every inhale pulls razors into his lungs, every movement like poison, but Loki forces himself to roll onto his side, angrily shoving at the chunk of debris—a chunk of a _planet_ , most likely—to get its weight off of him. The resulting dust is only more insult to an array of injuries, but he ignores them and pushes up onto his hands and knees, spitting globs of blood onto the ground until his mouth isn’t thick with it anymore. 

His throat feels raw from screaming. His wrists feel raw from iron bands. His eyes burn. 

They are not of this world, not of this life, and he pushes the phantom sensations aside as he plants his hands flat on the ground. Titan is far from the realms he’s studied and traveled in his long life, but it is still one of billions of planets which hang upon Yggdrasil’s branches. As such, it is still tied to the Tree, still part of this universe. His fingers curl into the red dirt, through it, and he imagines himself clawing through to the core of the planet until he finds the endlessly twisting nebulae that make up Yggdrasil’s bark. 

_Yggdrasil’s gifts are not free. She will demand a heavy price from you._  

“Please,” he rasps, teeth digging into his bottom lip as he desperately seeks out some hint of the Great Tree’s presence, the source of his and every Asgardian sorcerer’s power. It will cost him. It _has_ cost him; magic always does, and he’s run quite the tab of late. 

_And if I’m not willing to pay it?_  

He looks up, throat closing when he watches Thanos drive a spear of Stark’s own making through the Avenger’s side. 

_Oh, my darling. You’ve already begun to pay it._  

His hands begin to tingle. 

“Mother Tree. Lend me your strength. I will pay what you ask.” He looks up again to see Stark perched atop a mangled pile of debris, Thanos near enough to taunt him. “Yggdrasil. I surrender my life to you in payment. Show me the way. Show me how to end this monster.” 

The ground splits beneath his hands, deep cracks racing along the planet’s surface until the fissures begin emitting green mist. They converge again at Strange’s side, and the mist almost seems to solidify as it curls around the wizard’s outstretched wrist. Loki’s eyes widen at the sensation under his fingertips, a pulse too weak and rapid to mean anything but looming oblivion. 

His eyes drift back to Stark, who is beginning to slump as he desperately tries to stave off his own death. This obnoxious, arrogant, infuriating mortal, this insignificant speck of dust—this being who, Loki realizes now, is so intricately woven into so many versions of his own life that he can no longer separate his own feelings from that of a hundred thousand other lives he has lived or will live or is living on another plane. 

“I understand. I—” He hesitates, eyes closing as he sinks his hands into the gaps in the planet’s surface, into the swirling green mists that are both his doing and not. “Take what you will and let us end this.” 

Loki has felt the heat and electricity of the lightning at Thor’s command. He has felt the numbing cold of the Jotun’s grasp and the bone-shattering chill of the ice in his own veins—his birthright. He has felt his bones pulverized by the Hulk. He survived the Chitauri’s increasingly sadistic experiments, survived his “proving” period and survived their fire, their knives, their poison, their beatings, their starvation, their assorted other cruelties designed to break his body along with his mind until he begged them to let him serve their master. 

He has felt it all, survived it all, and yet it is nothing like the searing pain of his seiðr, of his _life_ being drained, cruelly ripped from every fiber of his being and from his very soul. The glowing inside the fissures flares, so bright now Loki can no longer look directly at it. The tendrils around Strange’s wrist spread out along his arm, over his shoulder, along his chest, up his neck and around his head, healing his otherwise fatal injuries. Tethered to the other end of the magical lifeline, Loki feels the sorcerer’s pulse slow to a more normal rate and grow steady and strong. 

The stones are calling to him again, humming in his blood, and Loki drags his attention away from Strange, who is just beginning to stir, to watch in horror as Thanos begins to close his fist. The stones radiate in the gauntlet, whispering deadly temptation straight into Loki’s brain, and then— 

“Stop!” 

The energy inside the cracked ground dissipates, but because Loki is still too weakened to find his footing, he watches, horrified, as the newly revived Strange, allegedly Earth’s most powerful sorcerer, _allegedly_ a genius, offers up their last bargaining chip to the deranged creature determined to annihilate half of creation. The Titan claims his prize and vanishes, and in the sudden, eerie quiet that descends on the ruined planet, Loki hears his blood thrumming in his ears and lets the swell of rage propel him to his feet. 

“You gods-damned fool,” he snarls, limping his way over to where Strange yet sits. The sorcerer regards him coolly, though a line forms in his brow as he seems to take in Loki’s appearance; Loki himself ignores it and drops a dagger out of his sleeve and into his waiting palm. “Do you have _any_ idea what you’ve just done? Or how you’ve doomed us all?” 

Strange says nothing and rubs the fingers of one hand absently around the other wrist, though the pointed look he directs at Loki says much of what he suspects. 

“We need to—” Stark steps forward, stumbling a little before regaining his balance with an outstretched hand against a piece of debris. “We need to regroup. Get back to Earth. He’s only missing the mind stone now, and I know where it is.” 

“It no longer matters,” Loki murmurs just before flinging the dagger in his hand into the ground, then spitting in disgust to rid his mouth of the last remnants of blood. “He will destroy everyone and everything on that pitiful little rock. And if the best defense it can offer is a cheap-rate sorcerer willing to surrender whatever small hope we had, then I would welcome its destruction.” 

“Yeah, well, _I_ wouldn’t. I’m kinda fond of the place, so either quit moping and get your shit together long enough to help us, or go find somewhere else to pout while we fix this mess,” Stark grouses, one hand over his side where his suit has healed over the wound. Instinctively, Loki reaches forward as though to offer aid, only to stop short when he sees the dark blue veins along the back of his hand have returned. It looks older, more gnarled, and when he looks up, he sees Stark eyeing him with open confusion. 

“The hell happened to you? I kind of like the new hair, but the eyes are a little freaky.” 

“He saved my life,” Strange points out in his usual dry monotone, which nonetheless makes Loki flinch. “At great cost to himself, I’m assuming.” 

“I’m rather wishing I hadn’t now.” 

Movement to his left draws Loki’s attention in that direction. Mantis looks between the gathered men, her face drawn in consternation. 

“Something is happening.” 

One by one, the last remaining living creatures on this all-but-destroyed planet begin to disintegrate, their ashes drifting away in a breeze that seems mocking for its gentleness. Mantis, Drax, Quill, Strange, the child—and it is that last one which seems to finally break Stark, when the terrified, sobbing boy in his arms simply melts away, returned to the same stardust and cosmic debris from which he had ultimately formed. 

Loki held his breath, counting the seconds and waiting for any sign of his own demise. Seconds turn into a minute, then two, and finally Nebula breaks the silence. 

“He did it.” 

Awe, horror, resignation, defeat—Loki can’t be bothered to tease out which emotion is most prevalent, only that they are all present and that it doesn’t really matter now which one is foremost on her mind. 

He casts an uneasy glance at Stark, who still sits in motionless shock, and then steps closer to Nebula, voice pitched low. “Can you fly Quill’s ship?” 

Nebula tilts her head slightly, eyes narrowing as she takes a moment to consider the mage before her—like she recognizes him, though she says nothing of the sort. Then she nods. “I can.” 

“Good. Get it ready. Please. We should . . .” Loki glances around at Titan’s ruins. “This place won’t be hospitable for long. We need to leave immediately.” 

“Agreed,” Nebula says before turning sharply on her heel and stalking off toward the Benatar. 

Loki turns his attention then to Stark, slowly making his way over and coming to a stop directly at the Avenger’s side. “We need to go.” Stark shows no sign of hearing him, so Loki kneels at his side, balancing himself with a hand atop Stark’s knee. “Tony. We need to go.” 

The unexpected physical touch and use of his first name combine to get a reaction, though not, perhaps, the one Loki expected. Stark’s face twists into a bitter expression, and he angrily shoves Loki away—or tries to, not that any human has the strength to even budge Loki or any Asgardian. 

“Are you happy now? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted him to win.” 

Loki bristles. “Yes. That’s precisely why I’ve been fighting alongside you. What are you—” 

“You led him to us!” Stark shrieks, voice cracking. “You showed him where we were. You did his bidding. You led his army to Earth. You—” 

“I did what I had to do to survive,” Loki fires back with venom and fire in his voice. “I never wanted your worthless little backwater planet. If I had, I’d have taken it, with or without his aid. You know, Barton told me much about you and your teammates. I hear you also found yourself held captive, and you _also_ had to make a decision to do something you’d rather not in order to secure your own freedom.” 

Stark’s eyes widen and his lips part, but Loki drives forward before he can speak. 

“Do not presume you are the only one with such an experience, you arrogant little mortal.” 

“Loki—” 

“Nebula and I are leaving this place,” Loki presses on, standing again and pretending he doesn’t wince from the lingering pain in his knees. “As you told me just minutes ago, you can stop feeling sorry for yourself and help us fix this, or you can stay here and pout until you rot. The choice is yours. But for what it’s worth, I would prefer if you joined us.” He lays a hand across Stark’s shoulder, firm and, for him at least, reasonably reassuring. “Your story isn’t over yet.” 

Stark looks up, eyes haunted and watering, bottom lip trembling just enough to notice. “Why? What’s the point? What do we do now?” 

Loki smiles slightly, sadly, down at him and shrugs. “Those are all very different questions, and I’m not sure I know how to answer them in a way that will comfort you at all. I can only tell you that I’ve come to believe our fates are intertwined, and so long as your story hasn’t ended yet, then I can only surmise that mine hasn’t, either.” 

He nods toward the ship as he hears its engines roaring to life, clear proof Nebula has gotten it ready for takeoff. 

“Come with me, Tony. We have another chapter to begin.” 

Stark moves on autopilot, still clearly too dazed, in too much pain—physical _and_ emotional, it seems—to fully understand anything going on around him. But Loki balances him with an arm around his midsection, lets Stark drape an arm around his shoulders, and walks them both toward the Benatar, where Nebula stands on the landing deck stairs, watching them both with suspicion. 

“We lost,” Stark mutters once they board the ship and he’s helped into a seat. Loki nods at Nebula to begin the takeoff procedure while he straps Stark into his chair and then repeats the process on himself. 

“Yes,” he agrees without argument, “we did. But we’re alive, which means we can still fight. We can still fix this.” 

“How? He won. How do we—” 

“I don’t know. I only know that you and I are quite good at proving others wrong when they say something is impossible. Between the both of us, we should be able to come up with a few ideas.” 

“It’s on me. I never should’ve given that kid a suit. I shouldn’t have—” 

Stark’s words are lost to the sounds of the ship beginning its upward climb, and as Loki peers through the port window to watch Titan’s surface recede below, he pretends not to hear the muffled weeping of a broken hero.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aboard the stalled-out Benatar, dying and drifting among the stars following the battle on Titan, Loki and Tony have a chat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to figure out how to shorten this chapter and couldn't, so here's a special double-sized installment to kick off the second part of this monster.

The Avenger is dying. 

They’re all aware of it. They don’t _speak_ of it, of course. That would be unseemly. But the truth is there for all of them to see, to step around with hushed voices and downcast eyes and conversation which carefully avoids any mention of what’s shouting all around them.

They’re all dying, really. Thanos’s metal daughter will go next. And then at some point, long after they’ve begun to stink with rot, Loki too will perish. And then the three of them will form an unlikely mausoleum floating forever through space, perhaps to be discovered one day thousands of years from now, or maybe just to drift without end, without discovery.

But Stark will go first. He is human, and more than that, he is wounded.

He and the metal woman have tended to the human’s injuries, her addressing the more pressing medical needs, Loki using what little of his magic is left in him to help pull the infection toward less vital areas of the body and away from more crucial organs. But it is spreading rapidly; Loki could sense it before he could smell it, and now he can _see_ it, the area around the stab wound going from an injured red to black as the skin around starts to die.

Their food supplies were exhausted days ago, and there is a terrible hunger gnawing at Loki’s stomach. They are weak and emaciated as their bodies begin to strip fat and muscle for any salvageable nutrients to keep functioning. Loki knows he can survive that as well as the thirst making his throat feel like it’s been scraped with glass; he’s done it before, and fittingly, that too was by Thanos’s design. The angry metal woman is made of similarly stern stuff and will survive for a time, but Stark . . .

Loki has tried to keep movement to a minimum, breathing shallowly to use as little of their remaining oxygen as he can. He knows too from unfortunate experience that he can live without that for a time as well—not forever, but much longer than the mortal and . . . whatever Nebula is.

The back end of the ship, still damaged as it is, is leaking fluids, one of which appears to be melted ice traveling from the outside and through a crack in the wall. Loki has watched the steady _drip, drip, drip_ as it gathers into the cup he’s positioned at the seam to catch it, and after nearly two days, when enough has been gathered for as many swallows, he takes the cup and the last remaining crumbs he’d been hoarding for himself as an emergency through the ship, guarding them like precious jewels until he sees Tony. Not Stark, not the brash, mouthy, arrogant creature, but just a thin, sickly-looking man who still bears a too-close resemblance to the Tony of so many of Loki’s visions of late.

The Avenger has been brought low, and it _should_ cheer Loki knowing that one of the humans who had so vexed him and had been so instrumental in his failed attempt to take Midgard is suffering such a fate. But as usual, what Loki _wants_ is never what he gets, and so he finds no satisfaction in this, only bitter resignation and something that might feel like regret if he cared to examine it further.

Tony doesn’t look up at the whisper-quiet footfalls, but he does nod in acknowledgement when Loki sits down next to him on the floor. Tony is staring at his armor’s helmet before him, utterly ruined on one side, its parts stripped and given to the blue woman instead. The gold stands out nicely, he thinks, but he has not said so; she doesn’t seem the type to appreciate his commentary.

“Hey,” Tony rasps, and Loki winces despite himself. The smith is deteriorating rapidly as his body begins to shut down, weakened by the malnourishment and unable to fend off the infection raging through his blood and settling into his organs.

He says nothing at first, but after some time he produces the cup from his side and presents it, along with the handful of broken pieces of dried fruit warmed by the heat of his palm. Tony stares at the fruit for a while, or _past_ it. Loki can’t really tell in the dim light of the ship’s cabin.

“Are those blueberries?”

Loki glances down at his hand and shrugs the shoulder closest to Tony. “I don’t know. I think they might have been, once.”

Tony laughs— _tries_ to laugh, but the noise is strangled in the dryness of his throat. He begins to wheeze, unable to draw in enough fresh air to compensate, and Loki holds the cup up to place it in his view.

“Drink.”

“Where did you—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Tony slants a distrustful look his direction, and Loki almost feels offended. He can’t say he’s terribly surprised no one trusts him, of course, but when he has nothing to gain by lying at this point . . .

“Are you trying to get me to go all Bear Grylls and drink your piss?”

“What? No.”

Tony looks at the cup as if considering it, but the frown stays lodged in place.

“What about her?” he asks, gesturing a hand that’s wasted away to little more than skin and bones at the blue woman sitting some feet away. She’s holding a blade for no reason Loki can fathom, and while her eyes are not on them, he knows from her posture alone that she is listening to every word passing between them. “Did _she_ pee in the cup?”

“It’s meltwater from the back of the ship, Stark.”

“You mean that hole by the exhaust port? Jesus.” Tony rasps out another weak laugh. “I’m already on the way out and you’re trying to poison me with coolant. Never change, Kylo. Fuck.”

Loki doesn’t understand or care about whatever insipid reference Tony is trying to make. He ignores it in favor of rolling his eyes and pressing the cup into Tony’s hand, refusing to let go until Tony’s too-thin fingers finally curl around and accept it.

“It’s water. Not much, and not exactly pleasant tasting, but it should help the pain in your throat.”

Tony looks down into the cup, swirls the liquid around as if inspecting it, and then finally shrugs and takes a sip. The lack of movement in his throat tells Loki that he’s savoring it, holding the water in his mouth before letting it glide on its own down his throat as he tips his head back against the wall.

It was barely as much of a drink as a hummingbird might take, but Tony’s face, gaunt and sallow as it has become, relaxes as if Loki has just offered him some miracle elixir. Under the circumstances, he might not be wrong about that.

“Thanks.”

Loki looks down at Tony’s free hand, the one not clutching the cup as if his life depends on it (…doesn’t it, though?), and wonders at how weak it looks. Tony in general looks frail, reduced beyond lean to frighteningly thin. His skin has gone dull and ashen. His body has already consumed any bit of spare fat it could find, but the face is what bothers Loki most. The fat deposits there have drained away, hollowing out Tony’s cheeks and making him look far older than he truly is.

Gone is the sarcastic, charismatic, energetic, eternally youthful man who had thrown taunting nicknames at Loki in Germany and then stripped down to only jeans and a T-shirt when cornered in his tower. He was a formidable opponent in the armor, Loki had found; he was no less dangerous outside of the metal suit, not while he still possessed that sharp tongue and brilliant mind. Loki sometimes finds himself regretting, even now, that the scepter had not worked on him. He thinks he could have had fun with such an interesting creature in his thrall.

But no. That bright-eyed and arrogant hero is gone. He looks like a man now. Just a tired, defeated man who has accepted his impending death.

Loki wonders if the rest of Stark’s teammates have survived, and if they have, if the toll of the loss has weighed as heavily on them.

He wonders if Thor has survived and if Thanos’s inane “random” choice has left a moon without its sun.

“I always thought—” Tony clears his throat and takes another sip, barely even a droplet; he means to savor this small reprieve, clearly, and Loki can’t say that he faults him for it. “When this whole . . . hero bullshit thing started. I always thought I’d end up dying in a flying tin can. Seemed appropriate. Didn’t really think it’d be like this, though.”

“Death never comes when or how we think it will.”

Tony’s head drops a little to the side, his gaze fixing on the helmet. After a few seconds, he kicks it away with whatever strength he has left, a bitter laugh burbling free that might have broken Loki’s heart under other circumstances, for all the years of sadness and exhaustion it carries.

“We weren’t—we weren’t supposed to lose. We’re the good guys. The good guys always win in these stories. We’re the good guys.”

“Speak for yourself,” Loki answers automatically, offering a small, tight smile when Tony glances over at him. The expression is returned, but the smile comes nowhere close to reaching the Avenger’s eyes.

Loki drops the frozen, stale pieces of blueberries into Tony’s open hand and, after a moment of hesitation, closes Tony’s fingers around them.

“You aren’t used to losing, are you?”

Tony stares at the offering in his hand for a long while before turning his eyes back up at Loki, an echo of a familiar smirk twisting at the corners of his mouth.

“Not as much as you are, no. You know I still have one of the dents in the floor in the Tower? Contractor fixed most of the damage, but I kept one of the spots. Had ‘em glass over it. Memento, you know?”

“Charming,” Loki deadpans, even though one side of his mouth twitches up into a barely-there grin despite himself. “You should know that vexed me for some time even after the stone’s power over me was broken. I could not _fathom_ how the army I was promised could fail against a handful of mortals.”

“Bad leadership.” Tony looks over at him. “It’ll get you every time. Companies fail from the top, right? Apparently, so do hostile alien invasions.”

“Perhaps,” Loki agrees easily enough, “but it’s rather a moot point now, isn’t it? Whether I had succeeded in taking your planet or not, we would likely still be precisely where we are now.”

Tony huffs and says nothing at first, just pops a crumbled piece of dried fruit into his mouth and chews on it for a few seconds. When he speaks again, his voice seems far from this place, cast out into the vastness of space around them.

“Perspective is a hell of a thing.”

Another crumb.

“I did everything right. I did everything I could, and I did it right, and it still wasn’t enough.”

Even half-delirious with pain and sickness and hunger and oxygen deprivation, Tony’s brain, as efficient and tireless as the machines under his command, is still working ceaselessly. He’s still picking everything apart, looking for miscalculations and encoding errors and glitches and logic failures that he can fix. But he is attempting to calculate the unfathomable, struggling to find reason in the irrational, looking for order in a kind of madness that even a god of chaos cannot understand.

Loki purses his lips in thought and follows Tony’s gaze out the port window to watch the stars twinkle, their light just reaching them even though the stars themselves likely died millions of years earlier.

“I’ve been there, Stark. Where you are in your head now. And I can assure you that if you follow that path, you won’t find the answers you seek. Only more questions and more doubt.”

“Why did—” Tony coughs and takes another few drops of water onto his tongue. Cherishes it like a lover’s kiss. Tries again. “Why did Strange give him the stone? Why would he—he said there’s one, just _one_ reality where we win. Well, we didn’t. We fucking lost. _Hard_. ‘Only way’ my ass. So why would he . . .”

“I’m not certain he was wrong.” And oh, but those words taste sour on Loki’s tongue, not helped at all by the incredulous look Tony levels at him. “You’re putting me in the very awkward position of having to defend my enemies and make sense of another sorcerer’s mind. But the mortal sorcerer is . . . well, he’s capable.”

“So you think he was right?”

“I don’t know,” Loki admits, and it pains him to do so. He plucks at a loose thread of his already tattered coat. “The stones are not _merely_ stones, you see. They are the very stardust from which all existence has spawned. They are life incarnate, born from the same nothingness with all the power of creation spread amongst them. They have been scattered, and they yearn to be whole again.”

Tony’s eyes lock onto his, piercing, discerning, betraying a fierce intelligence that Loki thinks he would like to have known under different circumstances. “You had two of them. The Tesseract and the scepter. They weren’t independent of each other, were they?”

Loki shakes his head. “No. They called to each other through me. The mind stone inside the scepter led me to its sister. The space stone—the Tesseract, as you called it—answered that call, and it would have led me to the others if I’d known how to speak its language.”

“They’re sentient.”

“Not entirely, but near enough to it.”

Tony’s body is failing, his mind a few steps behind, but he _knows_. He looks down at his hands, and Loki’s shoulders slump for reasons he still can’t fully define.

“If they can communicate with whoever’s wielding them, and they can communicate with each other, and their goals don’t necessarily line up with the person holding them . . .”

“You understand now.”

Tony lets out a broken, bitter laugh, one he doesn’t try to stifle this time with more water. He lets it happen, lets it hang in the air between them like fine grains of sand, so long that Loki starts to wonder if the engineer has lost his voice entirely.

“The fucking stone tricked him. It wanted to be with the others, and it told Strange what he needed to hear to let go of it, and it fucking worked.”

Loki swallows hard. His neck hurts again, and he isn’t sure why.

“I’m not saying for certain that’s what happened. But . . .” He closes his eyes against the tide of memories he’s tried so desperately to bury. The space stone is in his possession again, luring him into the depths of space and hurling him across such vast distances he thinks he could see the ends of the universe if he could only bring himself to open his eyes. The mind stone hums, not just from where the Chitauri had used it to break his own mind, but with the thoughts and dreams and knowledge of everyone it’s touched.

And then, when they’re close to each other, the humming becomes a deafening cacophony of noise that makes him, more than once, sink to his knees and bite through his lip to keep from screaming. They are whispering to him, creating visions of him as a god—a _true_ god, a force beyond all comprehension, the final deciding point between life and death and all of existence. And it’s so real, so _present_ that he weeps for it and promises whatever remains of his shattered mind, whatever he possesses of a blackened soul, promises his life and the lives of every living creature he can find if he can just have a _taste_ of that power.

“But?”

The question drags Loki back to the present, away from those poisonous memories and into the present horror that simply won’t end. He turns his head to look at Tony, deliberately pulling the mask away so that Tony can see him plainly and honestly, even just once.

“I would have burned your world and all it contained to ashes if that had been what the stones had told me to do. I would have torn my heart from my chest with my own bloodied hands and made an offering of it if it had been asked of me. And . . .”

He closes his eyes, knowing this is likely going to lead to the end of the conversation. At least Tony (probably) doesn’t have the strength to hit him.

“And I would have surrendered the Tesseract to Thanos if it had wanted to join its brethren.”

He braces himself for a punch that never comes, and when he opens his eyes in confusion, he sees Tony is staring into the cup again, clearly lost in his own thoughts.

“I did it for—” _For love_ , he wants to say, shivering at the memory of the power stone burying itself against Thor’s skull. But even if he believed without a doubt that that was true, he simply can’t bring himself to make such a confession. “It’s what the stone has ever wanted from me. Not to wield it as an owner, as one might lead a dog. I never _wielded_ it. I see that now. I was only ever its caretaker. And when it had used me and found that I had served my purpose . . .”

“It doesn’t matter.” Tony’s voice is quiet, quieter than Loki recalls ever hearing it before, absent all its bravado and sarcasm. It’s tired, just like the rest of him. “He would have gotten it out of you one way or the other.”

Loki doesn’t know why Tony might be saying things only to ease his conscience, if that is actually what Tony is doing at all, but he nods and then nudges Tony’s hand to draw his attention.

“Eat.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Loki sighs softly, uncertain what to do with this new Tony: broken, beaten, and resigned to his fate. It’s unsettling, to say the least.

Tony pops a blueberry into his mouth to chew on it, still staring at the helmet he kicked across the room a few minutes earlier. The air around them seems to grow heavy, even despite the way Loki can almost feel the oxygen being sucked from it molecule by molecule, every passing second making it harder to draw a proper breath.

The same is evidently on Tony’s mind, as when he speaks again, he only asks, “How long do you think you’ll make it?”

There’s little use in pretending he doesn’t know what Tony means. They all know they’re dying, though they haven’t outwardly acknowledged it yet. It isn’t a slap in the face or a crushing, oppressive blow; it just exists, as constant and inevitable as the infinite space around them. Comforting, in an odd way.

“If I can continue to get water from the leak in the back? We could have a week or two, perhaps. But that’s only if the air holds, and that doesn’t seem—”

“I didn’t ask about us,” Tony interrupts, turning that observant gaze back at Loki. “I’ll be dead in a few days, tops. We both know that. I’ve gotten pretty good over the years about listening to my body and knowing when it’s giving out on me, funny enough. Just what Pep always wanted. But I can feel . . .” He flexes his hands, and when one catches what little light exists where they’ve sequestered themselves, Loki can see the bluish tint of Tony’s nails, themselves worn to jagged ruins due to being used as tools on the suit when no other aids could be found.

“Let’s not bullshit ourselves here, okay? I can barely breathe. Hypoxia’s setting in. Long-term. Long enough for me to be aware of it, which sucks, but . . . I figure one of these nights, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, who knows, I’ll fall asleep and just not wake up. Not a terrible way to go, given the life I’ve had. I expected there to be a lot more blood involved.”

Nebula rises from her observation point on the step up to the ship’s higher level and walks away. Loki doesn’t care to call her back. No doubt she’s still listening, wherever she’s wandering off to.

“But you. You’re gonna hold out a while, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

Loki hates how often he’s been saying that, particularly in this conversation with . . . perhaps Tony doesn’t precisely qualify as an “enemy” any longer, but he certainly isn’t anything more than an ally. He isn’t a friend. He isn’t a confidante. He isn’t the lover certain fractions of Loki’s mind have happened across. And yet Loki finds himself spending what could be their last living moments together anyway, offering what little sustenance he can find to keep Tony’s failing body alive just a little longer.

Many things have been confusing Loki recently.

“You will,” Tony answers for him, as sure of himself as ever. “Which is why I need you to do something for me. Two things, actually.”

Nature is a funny thing, and Loki can’t deny his. It’s crude reflex that makes him wrinkle his nose at the request—no, the virtual _order_ Tony offers him.

“And what makes you think yourself worth my time that I would—”

“Because you’re here and you haven’t tried to kill me an’ the Blue Meanie over there to hoard all the spare oxygen for yourself. Any other stupid questions, or are you done posturing now so that I can get on with this?”

Loki’s eyes widen in surprise and heat flushes his cheeks. “It’s fortunate for you I don’t need to make any special efforts to kill you. Though I might still speed things along if you keep speaking to me so.”

There is a machine overhead, a warning klaxon that was damaged (along with most of the ship) on Titan. It used to be a steady, droning siren that drove the three of them to distracted madness until it, too, died once Tony decided he’d had enough and rearranged the wiring so that their limited power could be directed toward something more helpful and considerably less annoying.

Now and then, though, the siren comes back to life, just for a moment, the ghostly call of a dead piece of equipment on an equally dead ship. The sudden obnoxious beeping, loud and piercing, never fails to startle them all, making them look around for the noise in anxious hope that maybe some hidden power supply has finally kicked into gear.

Just as Loki finishes his threat, the klaxon goes off again, a loud whining noise that sets his teeth on edge. None of them react now. They don’t jump to their feet to start scouring the ship for the source of its power. They don’t even look up—not until Nebula makes a low growling noise, climbs onto a table, and slams a knife into a speaker mounted to the ceiling. When that doesn’t work, she pulls at the speaker until it pries loose, and then she begins tearing at the wiring feeding it, ripping it out by the handful until the siren finally, mercifully, groans into its final death.

She says nothing afterward, just stares at the two men staring at her before dropping back down into her seat, eyes focused on something on the floor and out of Loki’s view.

Tony, ever a bundle of barely contained energy, shifts on the floor, though his movements are sluggish and clumsy now. He stares at his arms, obviously frustrated they aren’t doing what he wants them to do, and he fights them until they cooperate enough to at least let him pull at the legs of his pants to bring his knees up halfway to his chest. He rests his elbows upon them and leans his head back against the wall again, blinking up at the ceiling without, it seems, actually _looking_ at anything.

“If you somehow find a way out of this,” he begins, tongue darting out to lick his lips, cracked from the lack of moisture in his mouth and the oppressively dry, thin air of the ship, “and if you make it back to Earth, if . . . if Pepper . . .”

The Avenger goes quiet, and even in the darkness, Loki can see the tell-tale sheen of his eyes. It’s too honest, too much from someone he should still consider an enemy; he _should_ memorize it and use it later at an opportune moment to take Stark off guard, exploit that vulnerability and turn it into a possibility.

But Loki simply acknowledges it and lets it slide through his mind like mist. It’s a thought, a memory, perhaps, which isn’t his to hold, a sight he isn’t meant to see, and he’s developed enough of a grudging respect for this tiresome human that he can at least afford him the dignity of his emotions held in confidence.

“I’ll tell her,” Loki agrees, and something like relief drops Tony’s shoulders and eases the tension in his jaw. “I realize my word isn’t worth much, rather by design. But to the extent you feel you can trust it, I swear to you, I will tell her.”

Tony seems to consider that and then nods. “Thank you. And I’ve got enough juice left in the helmet. Its on-board memory is still working, I think. If I record something for her—”

“No, Tony.”

The use of his first name is enough to pull Tony from his thoughts and drag his eyes to the side. “What?”

“You’ll have died along with everyone else when I tell her. She doesn’t need to know about this. You’ll be dead regardless, and she will grieve. Allow her what small comfort she can glean from believing your death was swift and painless, not drawn out like this.”

A second stretches out to two, to five, to ten, before Tony finally nods. “Okay. Yeah, that’s probably for the best. I just . . . I’ve still got so much to tell her, you know? And if I could just get one last message to her . . .”

“There is never enough time and always one last message,” Loki points out, his voice quiet and surprising even him with how soft it’s gone. It surprises Tony as well, it seems, judging from his furrowed brow. “For whatever my counsel may be worth, I would advise against this.”

Tony laughs, harsh and angry and bitter, and the noise grates on Loki, echoes hollowly through the cabin. “God. Getting advice from the _god of lies and mischief._ Of all the damn turns my life could’ve taken . . .”

“You could simply say no.”

“It’s fine, Snape. Really. I’m just . . .” He sighs softly, barely a noise at all. His head rolls on his shoulders again, lulling to the side so that he can look over at his unlikely new companion. “There’s someone else I need you to find. If they’re . . .” His mouth works silently for a while before he closes his eyes, takes a breath, and tries again. “The kid, Peter, he has—had—an aunt. Her name’s May. Lives in Queens in New York. Tell her . . .”

Tony goes quiet for a long while, whatever moisture is left in his body forcing its way to his eyes in a desperate attempt to escape.

“Tell her I’m sorry, and I tried, and I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I told her I’d keep an eye on him. And I did, and I just watched him die. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Loki turns his head and pretends not to notice the tears flowing over to trace clean paths through the grime caked on Tony’s face. Rather, he looks out the port window, unsurprised but still discouraged to see the exact same objects in the exact same positions as the last time he tried to gain some kind of hope by staring out into the stars. It had seemed such an easy thing once, to stand in Heimdall’s observatory and peer through an open portal to try to see even a glimpse of what the gatekeeper could see. But the stars are closed to him now, guarding their secrets like dragons sitting jealously atop their hoards. When all he seems to bring is chaos and destruction with him wherever he goes, he can’t entirely blame the very stars themselves for not being more inviting.

“This boy. He meant much to you.”

It isn’t a question, but from his peripheral vision, Loki sees Tony nod anyway.

“Yeah. He’s—he _was_ —goddammit,” Tony splutters with a choked sob, and Loki pretends not to notice _that_ , either. “He was a good kid. A great kid. _Just_ a kid. And I know—I _know_ it might not have mattered, that maybe he’d have . . . he’d have been taken . . . I know it might still have gone the same, but I keep thinking that maybe if I’d stopped this a long time ago, hadn’t let some teenager get himself roped into all this, if I hadn’t _enabled_ it, maybe—”

“No, Tony.” Loki’s voice is calm and, well, never gentle, but at least as non-threatening and as serious as he can ever let it be. “You will drive yourself into madness imagining what might have happened if you had taken a different path. Don’t dwell. You can’t change the past.”

“Bullshit,” Tony fires back, anger creeping into his voice. “I don’t want to hear a goddamn _sorcerer_ from a planet full of fucking _space Vikings_ tell me anything is impossible. I’ve seen you do things, Loki, that I can’t explain. And that’s what I do—I piece things out. I figure them out. I make them work. And nothing about you works. Nothing about you makes sense. So don’t you sit there and fucking tell _me_ that you don’t think we can change anything, especially not when _another_ magic show freak had an equally magical glowing rock that could do exactly that.”

“And now we no longer have him _or_ that ‘rock,’” Loki points out, and that—Loki might regret that later when he considers how Tony seems to crumple in on himself, deflating as if Loki has just snatched the last thread of hope directly from his grasp. And perhaps he has. It wouldn’t be the first time. But when that hope is all that is left, when Loki finds himself in the midst of the same despair, he can’t quite find the same sadistic glee in the act that he once did.

Thor’s boundless optimism and affection have made him soft, and Loki could spit from it all.

“You never did explain what happened to you,” Tony murmurs, prompting Loki to frown and tip his head slightly in confusion. “On Titan, I mean. You look . . . different.”

Loki’s mouth twists at the unwelcome memory. Shortly after the Benatar took to the stars and then stalled, Loki, in the process of scavenging supplies, had caught a glimpse of his reflection in the polished surface of a steel locker and nearly mistaken himself for someone else. His dark hair was, as it still is, shot through with silvery strands in no discernable pattern. The lines around his eyes and mouth were deeper. The dark blue veins were still visible on his hands and wrists. But his eyes were what stood out the most and what still take him off-guard now and then when he forgets and catches sight of himself; they were no longer the brilliant emerald he remembered, nor even the eerie blue while he had been under the mind stone’s spell. They were a more muted green now, but ringed in a thick band of gold.

“Strange was dying. I struck a deal to keep him alive, believing that so long as he was guardian of the time stone, that perhaps we could delay the inevitable, if not necessarily prevent it.” Loki smiles without a trace of mirth, gaze raking over the backs of his hands. “I traded my life, or at least some of it. I’d supposed I’d get a better return on my investment than buying him another half hour or so.”

“Well, it’s not a bad look. And as someone who’s been getting more than a few gray hairs over the last few years, I think it looks distinguished.”

Loki snorts out a laugh. “You would use your dying breaths to try to seduce someone else, wouldn’t you?”

“I mean, I hope I’ve got a few more breaths in me, but I don’t know. Is it working?” Tony grins slowly, just a spark of his old personality lighting in his eyes for a moment, fleeting and heartbreaking for its brevity, and Loki hears an echo of another life, another world, urging him to push for more.

But he is not that Loki, and this is not that Tony, and so he sighs and shakes his head.

“I believe you have more breaths in you. Before Thanos arrived on Titan, you asked me what I saw when I touched the time stone.” Loki hesitates, eyes drifting back to his hands before turning up to meet Tony’s stare again. “I saw you. Many versions of you, and of myself. They aren’t . . . visions, I don’t think. I’m not sure what they are. Possibilities such as Strange himself saw? I don’t know. But I saw countless lives, and we were allies in many of them. Enemies in many of them.” Lovers in many, but Loki chooses to keep that to himself.

He worries at the inside of his cheek for a moment before continuing.

“I saw life, Tony. And one in particular . . . does the name Morgan mean anything at all to you?”

Tony’s eyes widen, and the way his mouth parts tells Loki all he needs to know, even if Tony can’t (or won’t) verbally respond.

“I saw that, too. She is the light in your world. I don’t know that she is _your_ fate or the fate of some other version of you that I saw, but you owe it to yourself—and to her—to keep fighting.”

They sit there for some time after, Loki waiting and waiting and never getting a response. When he looks over again, he notices that Tony has drifted to sleep, and Loki doesn’t want to consider why he’s a bit anxious that the Avenger may not wake again. It will happen soon, he knows; Tony will close his eyes to sleep, and when his lungs have exhausted themselves or the infection finishes its bloody, ruinous course through Stark’s body, he will simply drift into death. Peacefully, if fate is with him; Loki considers it a kindness that the infection will likely kill him before the lack of oxygen does. He doesn’t look forward to hearing Nebula’s death rattles as she gasps and chokes, unable to pull enough oxygen from the air around them to breathe. He certainly doesn’t look forward to experiencing the same himself.

Loki folds Tony’s hands over the blueberries still in his palm so that they don’t spill onto the floor by accident, and then he, too, lets his mind wander into a dreamless sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being trapped on a dead ship after the end of the universe does strange things to a person. 
> 
> Or, how Tony begins to lose his mind and Loki picks a fight with Nebula because he's bored.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo...October, huh? Yeah. Sorry about that. I'll try to do better!

“He’s getting worse.”

Nebula, ever the master of the obvious, as Loki has found, is perched atop a worktable next to him. They’re both watching Tony on the far side of the ship, his frail form twitching with muscle spasms as he just keeps speaking to someone or something only he can see. The fever set in the night before, the hallucinations shortly after, and around the third time Loki had been called “Jarvis,” as if that meant anything to him, he’d handed over nursemaid duties to Nebula and left her to do what she could to keep the Avenger’s flushed skin as cool as possible, given the lack of water.

They’re neither of them healers and their bedside manner is abysmal, but they have formed an unspoken agreement nonetheless: they will stay with Tony until he has passed. He fought well and bravely against Thanos; the least they can do is see him into death as shieldmates.

And what a turn Loki’s life has taken, he thinks, that he should be picking at his blunt fingernails, an ancient, unconscious nervous tick from childhood, fretting about whether a mortal man should live but a little longer. His life was always going to be nothing more than a blink compared to Loki’s, so why should he care? It isn’t as though Loki himself hasn’t tried to kill him—more than once, even.

But in another life, perhaps, under different circumstances, he thinks he might have tolerated Stark better, even liked him for his fierce intelligence and sharp wit. They might have been friends if the Norns had set them on the same course, or at least not made their first meetings so violent and antagonistic. And, as the alternate paths have shown him, they might have been more than that, or maybe they were, or will be, in some other, happier version of his life that never happened or has yet to occur.

More than that, though, much as it pains Loki to admit, this obnoxious mortal in the tin suit is his last connection to Thor, who is himself his last remaining tie to Asgard. Even the thought makes Loki snort, and it draws a sharp, reproachful look from Nebula, which he dutifully ignores. It seems like centuries and yet also only hours ago when he would have relished the chance to sever every connection he had to Asgard, to his false family, to the people who spread vicious gossip about him at court and who sneered at him in the streets when they thought he didn’t notice them. Gladsheim’s shining towers were only ever veneered with gold to hide the rot in the foundations. Let it remain destroyed and pass into legend or be forgotten like the stardust it will one day become again. Loki would have hastened its demise himself not so long ago.

But now . . .

The Norns are playing with him. He has long suspected it, but he is certain of nothing so much as this now. To leave Asgard’s foolish sons as possibly the _only_ caretakers of its legacy—Thor, the one who never ceased trying to give the throne away, and Loki, he who would take it by bartering away whatever blackened, tattered bit of rubbish existed in him in place of a soul. Neither of them could rule. Thor would get restless and yearn for battle, more capable of defending Asgard from hostile forces with lightning as his disposal and Mjolnir in hand; Loki would grow bored of the endless political maneuvering, the constant petty squabbles brought before him to judge as a worthy king, the whole mundane business of it all. A trickster on a throne! What a punishment indeed.

And yet they may be the last reminders of a nearly extinct race from a planet which no longer exists, and only one of them even has any _legitimate_ right to claim Asgardian heritage at all.

The Norns are cruel, and Loki hopes that if they have survived the cataclysms of late that they are regretting their choices.

“J, no, run the scan again.”

Loki blinks, pulling himself from his mind and back into the cabin, not that the present is much better than bittersweet memories. Tony is sitting upright despite Nebula’s protests, his top discarded to expose the skin pulled taut against his chest, his ribs standing out in sharp relief, and Loki swallows hard. He remembers the feeling of his body turning on itself when left without other options for nourishment, and he remembers too that it was, even if indirectly, Thanos’s doing then as it is now.

“Stark—”

Tony brushes off Nebula’s attempts to make him stop fussing with a monitor that has long since lost its power source. His skeletal fingers continue to poke at the screen, flicking this way and that as if passing through holographic displays, his eyes fever-bright and ringed in red and purple bruises. Sweat pools in his collarbone, which juts too far from the rest of his body now.

“There’s nothing there,” Nebula tries again, and Loki can plainly hear the growing irritation in her voice at having to explain what everyone else already knows. If Tony understands her, if he can even hear her, he shows no sign of it and instead goes about adjusting an invisible strap on his arm for what Loki can only presume is a piece of his armor.

“J, get—there’s a—a hole in Pete’s suit. I need you to deploy the remote . . . the remote . . . the . . . fix it. The remote—”

Loki closes his eyes. How he would have relished taking control of Tony’s mind just a few short years ago, reducing him to little more than a servant to do his bidding. But to see the man reduced to _this_ , to a jabbering fool, his mind deteriorating with frightful swiftness as his body fails all around it? No. No, this isn’t what Loki wanted. None of this is anything like he wanted, and the Norns, the Norns, damn them, they _knew—_

“He won’t live through tomorrow,” Nebula says by way of announcing her presence as she comes back to sit down next to Loki. She keeps her distance, still distrustful, and he nods.

“Likely not. Is it the infection?”

Nebula says nothing, but her gaze immediately goes to the darkening patch of skin on Tony’s stomach, spreading upward toward his chest.

“I saw you on Sanctuary.” The word alone makes Loki’s skin crawl, and he casts a dark glance at Nebula to see her staring at him with those same intense eyes. “Briefly. My father sent me to deliver a message to the Other.”

“Jarvis, buddy, you listening? Dad says he needs that prototype drawn up. I’m going out. Can you do that for me?”

Loki winces and tries to pull his attention away from Tony’s deranged rambling, though he isn’t certain he’d rather focus on his own mind. Memories of that desolate rock have haunted him since he first fell onto it, half-dead and disoriented. If these are to be among his final days, he’d rather not grant those same memories a place of honor in the forefront of his mind.

But Nebula is still watching him, waiting, so he digs his nails into his palms and asks. “And what was your message?”

The blue woman hesitates just for a fraction of a second, obviously calculating how quickly she needs to pull a knife in case her words hit too close to home. Loki recognizes that expression on her face and the tell-tale twitch of her fingers.

“To tell him you were ready.”

Loki’s shoulders stiffen for just a moment before he barks out a laugh, a noise so strangled that even Tony looks in his direction; he doesn’t _see_ , but he looks anyway before going right back to playing pretend with a dead monitor and a fever-ruined mind.

“And what did you think, daughter of Thanos? When you saw his would-be herald? Hmm? What did you see?”

She’s being tested, _knows_ it, and still does not flinch. Doing so would invite hands around her throat and daggers sliding between her ribs; they both know that, and she passes cleanly, her gaze unwavering.

“I saw you broken. Bloody. You were crouched against a rock with a hand to your stomach. I could see intestines. You were delirious and screaming in a language I had never heard. Your hands were burnt to the bone so that you could not have held a dagger comfortably, but you held it anyway, and you threatened anyone who came near.”

Loki’s jaw tightens. The picture she paints sounds familiar, but only because it was lived over and over again, an endless, repetitive nightmare played out for hours, for years, for centuries. He still does not know how much time passed there on Sanctuary—and what a misleading name that is. It may well have been only a few days, or he may have been there through a star’s entire life cycle. It doesn’t matter now, nor did it matter then.

“I thought my father was mistaken. We were—” Nebula catches herself, the briefest flicker of emotion passing across her face as she corrects the misstep. “He was promised a vassal to lead his warriors into glorious battle. I saw only a frightened, defeated god buying his life with promises he never meant to keep and would not have kept even if he could have done it.”

Despite himself, Loki notices one corner of his mouth turning up into a faint smirk in response to the confession. “Were we not already destined to meet Death soon, I would kill you myself right now.”

Nebula, for her part, does not so much as blink. “You could try.”

“Did you make them stop? If I was to be your father’s champion, it seems it would have been your duty to keep them from removing me from contention. So tell me: did you make them stop?”

He already knows the answer, of course; no one _ever_ made the Chitauri stop rearranging his guts and his brain and forcing his bones into new positions. But the trap is laid, and Nebula hesitates, her eyes narrowing the moment she senses it. Her fingers twitch again, this time sliding back to the hilt of the knife strapped to her thigh.

“No.”

“Hmm.”

For a few moments, it’s the only answer Loki gives, at least until he notices Nebula’s posture ease from the defensive form she had taken immediately upon understanding how Loki meant to snare her.

“You know, I saw your sister on this ship before.”

He looks over at her, hands splayed to show there is no knife in his grasp—but he has one nonetheless, and he drives it slowly, deliberately into whatever system of wires has possibly replaced her heart, twisting until he sees her eyes widen.

“How cruel a fate it must be to know that not only did your father sacrifice her to complete his life’s work, but that he didn’t even love you enough to use you in her stead and give you the honor of winning him one of his precious gems. Even _I_ was given that much.”

A flash of white teeth bared against blue skin and Nebula is suddenly lunging at him, quick as lightning, but Loki is ready. He rolls with her momentum, both of them emerging afterward in a crouch, knives drawn. She moves first, leaping forward with a roar, daggers poised to kill, only to go sailing through the illusion in place of where Loki had just been positioned.

“Thanos should have listened to the Other,” she snarls, eyes darting around the darkness to try to locate the shadow that doesn’t belong. “You’re weak, Asgardian, and a coward. You hide behind tricks because you can’t fight well enough to—”

The remainder of the insult is lost to a startled, angry yelp as Loki materializes behind her, solid and deadly. He moves with the grace and precision earned through an untold number of battles over an untold number of centuries, one arm snaking around Nebula’s throat in a tight chokehold to steady her as he points the tip of his dagger into her chest, just far enough to dig into her bodysuit.

“And you’re sloppy and overconfident.”

Nebula struggles, a rat trapped in a snake’s grasp, and Loki’s arm around her throat tightens all the same. When he speaks again, he does so with a slight rasp, his words every bit as jagged and cruel as the knife still aimed directly at where he assumes Nebula’s heart should be. He leans in close to Nebula’s ear, and no small part of him delights in how Nebula winces at the hot spittle flying from his lips to land on her cheek as he talks.

“Now that I’ve met you and seen how disappointing you really are, I understand why your father favored the better daughter.”

With an anguished cry more similar to what Loki would expect from an animal, Nebula lashes out in a wild fury of jagged elbows and well-aimed feet, eventually wriggling into a space loose enough for her to sink her teeth into Loki’s forearm—a forearm left bare by his (stupid, he now realizes) decision the previous day to remove his armor.

The rush of endorphins is exquisite, he thinks, even as he curses through the sudden sharpness of the bite. She twists sharply to the side, her movements fluid and evidence of long hours of practice, and Loki allows it. It will be easier to counter her movements when he isn’t preoccupied by the possibility of her breaking his arm, after all.

She turns on her heel and drops into a crouch, long blades already in her hands, and Loki smiles without a trace of mirth. Just as with Stark, he believes he might have liked this one in another life.

“Perhaps we’ve started our friendship under the wrong circumstances,” he tries, hands spread, smile still stretching his lips. Nebula bares her teeth, fingers twitching around the hilts of her blades, and Loki’s smile sharpens into a wicked grin as his own daggers materialize in his hands. “Fine. Have it your way, then.”

Nebula lunges again with a guttural cry. She moves quickly and confidently, a deadly foe in any other situation—but unfortunately for her, she faces a Jotun trained for a millennium by Asgard’s finest warriors. She is too slow for his enhanced reflexes, and he easily sidesteps her, bringing his knee up at the last second to drive it into her stomach as she comes barreling into the space he had previously occupied. Her breath leaves her in a great rush as he grips the back of her neck and flings her the rest of the way to the floor, where she lands with a grunt.

“This won’t end well for you,” he warns, poking at her side with the toe of his boot until she rolls onto her back. “We’re also wasting precious oxygen, so if you don’t mind . . .”

He stretches out a hand to offer Nebula a way up, his grin turning into a defiant smirk when she mutters under her breath and then wraps her fingers around his wrist.

One day, Loki will learn not to gloat before he’s secured victory. One day.

Under the pretense of using her other hand for leverage, she reaches up to grasp his shoulder. She waits until Loki is partially bent before she strikes, pulling him down to drive her forehead against his to disorient him. Loki’s vision swims just long enough for him to notice the world tilting around him as he’s flipped by a leg hooked behind his knee, still weakened as it heals from the attack aboard the Statesman. He bites his cheek to avoid revealing the weak spot, but it doesn’t matter; he lands on his back and clears his vision just in time to see Nebula straddle his abdomen. The blade in her left hand glints in the dim light of the ship as it reaches his throat, pressing close enough to just graze the skin. The blade in her right hand, meanwhile, is poised directly over his heart, the point digging through his leathers and scratching at his under-tunic. She holds the hilt like a pick, leaning forward to press her weight into it so that the blade digs that much deeper.

Loki laughs, somewhat breathlessly, and holds his hands up in a mocking show of surrender. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were flirting with me.” He licks his lips and lets his eyes go half-lidded in response to Nebula’s hateful growl. “You aren’t the first to approach a romantic encounter with me like this.”

“I will flay the skin from your worthless corpse and feed it to the first wild dog I find.”

“Yes, of course. You aren’t the first to threaten _that_ , either.” Then, just because he can, Loki meets Nebula’s eyes, his own full of scorn and threats. “My, you are _always_ second-best, aren’t you?”

“Don’t toy with me, Asgardian,” Nebula warns, murder in her voice.

Loki shakes his head, eyes going wide with feigned honesty. With Nebula leaning so close over him, Loki has all the freedom to hide his hands behind her back, skin tingling as his disorientation fades and his magic manifests itself in his palms with an emerald glow. “I would _never_.” He leans up just enough to get in her face. “You’ve apparently never been worth anyone else’s time, and you certainly aren’t worth mine.”

She realizes her mistake in leaving herself vulnerable just a moment too late. Her eyes go huge and she begins to turn, only to cry out as Loki’s magic settles around her, tendrils wrapping around her throat, midsection, and arms to haul her back. He sends her away with a flick of his wrist, leaving her to crash into—and partially _through_ —the metal lockers several feet away.

“Are you quite finished humiliating yourself?” he asks with a drawn-out whine, patronizing and mocking. He hears a pained groan from the collapsed pile of broken steel, followed shortly afterward by a flurry of angry curses, and he sighs—dramatically, but happily. Good. He wasn’t ready to end this just yet, either. He’s only got a small scratch on his neck to speak for his efforts, and he _knows_ Nebula can do better. Thanos would not have raised a child capable of anything less.

“I will—” Nebula’s words are cut off by a clattering of metal as she emerges from the rubble, dark eyes somehow conveying nothing short of violent hatred even with all their lack of expression. She shoves her way to freedom, and Loki almost admires how she regains her footing with a surprising amount of pride and determination still intact. “I will take great pleasure in finishing what my father started with you.”

Loki’s previous good mood falters slightly, but the mask slams back into place quickly enough that it’s unlikely Nebula noticed. And even if she did? Loki can’t particularly bring himself to care.

He stalks toward her, unsheathing a dagger from where it’s been strapped to the side of his right thigh. It’s perfectly balanced, a stunning piece of dwarven craftsmanship that he keeps on his person more for show than out of any sense of practicality. But this feels like as good a time as any to test it out, and he suspects Nebula has some innate understanding of the symbolism as her eyes track his movements, watching the blade turn over and over in his hand as he tosses it end over end.

“You would be wise to stand down now,” he begins, fingers tightening around the dagger handle once it settles into his palm again, warm and solid and _right_. “But if you insist, I’ll be happy to relieve you of your organs. The human could make better use of the air you’re sucking up anyway.”

One day, Loki will _also_ learn not to antagonize an enemy when they’re merely down, not disabled. He of all people should know that is when one is at one’s most dangerous—cornered, humiliated, and willing to abandon caution in exchange for pure fury.

He _laughs_ as Nebula launches herself at him again, a blur of azure movement that he dodges easily at first. Her frenzied slashes, on the other hand, are not so easily avoided, and he draws in a sharp breath through his teeth as one of the blades slashes across the back of his leg, slicing through the leather and into the skin. It isn’t deep, but it’s an unwelcome sight regardless when he sees his own blood dotting the silver in her hand.

If she notices at all, she doesn’t stop to gloat or even acknowledge the momentary advantage. She presses on, relentless, howling with all the rage of an unleashed animal as she continues slashing at everything she can reach. Loki counters most of her efforts, but when she lands another hit to his side, this one deeper than the cut to his leg, he reels to the side to put distance between them, panting and shaking his hair from his eyes.

“You,” he starts, breathing heavily as he extends his arm, sighting down the length of it and the dagger he’s pointing squarely at the tender hollow at the base of her throat. “You . . . are perhaps more than I reckoned you to be. Only slightly, though.” He draws the tip of his tongue across his teeth, immediately tasting blood from a cut lip, and he grins. “Come on then. You’re just now showing some promise.”

Loki continues to laugh and laugh and _laugh_ , thrilled by the sheer absurdity of it all as they tumble, smashing the interior of the ship to pieces, blades striking viciously at each other the entire time. If they leave well enough alone, they’ll both be dead eventually anyway. Their meager food and water stores are exhausted. The oxygen in the ship is woefully depleted and being drained even faster with their needless exertion. Death will claim them soon enough even if they sit and chat like old friends; there is no need to rush that journey.

It makes no sense, and so Loki laughs as he feels the delicate bones in his hand break when he aims a fist at Nebula’s head and hits a solid block of metal. He laughs He laughs when she goes to bite him again to get him to relinquish a hold while she’s crouched over him, which only encourages him to get his knees under her and flip her up and over his head. He laughs when one of her blades glances off his forehead, nicking the delicate skin there and sending a surprising amount of blood pouring into his eyes and down into his mouth.

He continues to laugh, in fact, until he notices the dark hull filling with an almost unbearable amount of warm, golden light, the source of which appears to be a solid shape of some kind directly at the front of the Benatar.

He and Nebula get to their feet, breathing harshly, bleeding, leaning to one side or the other in obvious discomfort, and watch the light recede just enough to reveal the shape of a woman hovering in the vacuum of space without, it seems, any ill effects.

“One of yours?” Loki rasps, spitting blood onto the floor and then wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

“No,” Nebula answers while sinking back against a now-broken metal table while doing her best to appear she isn’t doing exactly that. “One of yours?”

“No. I think . . .” He watches as the woman looks down at Tony, sprawled across the floor and oblivious to his surroundings in the midst of his infection-driven fever. “I think she’s here for him.”


End file.
